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PIPEFULS 



Other Books by the Author 

Paknassus on Wheels 

The Haunted Bookshop 

Shandygaff 

Mince Pie 

Kathleen 

Songs for a Little House 

The Rocking Horse 

Hide and Seek 

Travels in Philadelphia 







"^ 




P I P E F U L S 






BY ,. „ •-'■^'^ 






CHRISTOPHER MORLEY 






¥( (Cyrik .^^ 












^Xm 


^J 








m 






ILLUSTRATED 






BY 






WALTER JACK DUNCAN 






GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 






DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 






1920 














©CI.A601530 



COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 

INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 



NOV \ \ 1920 



' THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 
TO 

THREE MEN 

HULBERT FOOTNER 

EUGENE SAXTON 

WILLIAM ROSE BENET 

BECAUSE, IF I MENTIONED ONLY ONE 

OF THEM, I WOULD HAVE TO 

WRITE BOOKS 

TO INSCRIBE TO THE OTHER TWO 




PREFACE 

Sir Thomas Browiste said that Eve was "edified 
out of the rib of Adam." This little book was 
edified (for the most part) out of the ribs of two 
friendly newspapers. The New York Evening Post 
and The Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. To 
them, and to The Bookman, Everybody's, and The 
Pvhlishers' Weekly, I am grateful for permission to 
reprint. 

Tristram Shandy said, "When a man is hemm'd in 
by two indecorums, and must commit one of 'em 
let him chuse which he will, the world will blame 
him." Now it is one indecorum to let this col- 
ledlion of small sketches go out (as they do) un- 
revised and just as they assaulted the defenceless 
reader of the daily prints; and the other indecorum 
would be to take fragments of this kind too gravely, 
and attempt by more careful disposition of their 
pallid members to arrange them into some appear- 
ance of painless decease. As Gilbert Chesterton 
said (I wish I could say, on a similar occasion): 
"Their vices are too vital to be improved with a 
blue pencil, or with anything I can think of, except 
dynamite." 



Preface 

These sketches gave me pam to write; they will 
give the judicious patron pain to read; therefore we 
are quits. I think, as I look over their slattern 
paragraphs, of that most tragic hour — it falls about 
4 F. M. in the office of an evening newspaper — ^when 
the unhappy compiler tries to round up the broodings 
of the day and still get home in time for supper. 
And yet perhaps the wiU-to-live is in them, for are 
they not a naked exhibit of the antics a man will 
commit in order to earn a living? In extenuation it 
may be pleaded that none of them are so long that 
they may not be mitigated by an accompanying pipe 
of tobacco. 

THE AUTHOB. 

Roslyn, Long Island, 
July, 1920. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface vii 

On Making Friends 3 

Thoughts on Cider ........ 10 

One-Night Stands 18 

The Owl Train 2 

Safety Pins 29 

Confessions of a "Colyumist" 34 

Moving 4 

Surf Fishing 48 

"Idolatry" 52 

The First Commencement Address .... 6' 

The Downfall of George Snipe 63 

Meditations of a Bookseller 66 

If Buying a Meal Were Like Buying a House 71 

Adventures in High Finance ..... 74 

On Visiting Bookshops 78 

A Discovery 83 

Silas Orrin Howes 91 

ix 




X Contents 

PAGB- 

Joyce Kilmer . 97 

Tales of Two Cities 109 

I. Philadelphia: 

An Early Train 

Ridge Avenue 

The University and the Urchin 

Pine Street 

Pershing in Philadelphia 

Fall Fever 

Two Days Before Christmas 

In West Philadelphia 

Horace Traubel 

n. New York: 

The Anatomy of Manhattan 

Vesey Street 

Brooklyn Bridge 

Three Hours for Lunch 

Passage from Some Memoirs 

First Lessons in Clowning 

House Hunting 

Long Island Revisited 

On Being in a Hurry 

Confessions of a Human Globule 

Notes on a Fifth Avenue Bus 

Simday Morning 

Venison Pasty 

Grand Avenue, Brooklyn 

On Waiting for the Curtain to Go Up . . . 236^ 

Musings of John Mistletoe 240 

The World's Most Famous Oration . . . 242 

On Laziness • . . . 244 

Teaching the Prince to Take Notes . ,. . 249"* 

A City Notebook . 25S 

On Going to Bed 270' 



PIPEFULS 



PIPEFULS 



ON MAKING FRIENDS 




CONSIDERING that most friendships are 
made by mere hazard, how is it that men find 
themselves equipped and fortified with just the 
friends they need? We have heard of men who 
asserted that they would like to have more money, 
or more books, or more pairs of pyjamas; but we have 
never heard of a man saying that he did not have 
enough friends. For, while one can never have too 
many friends, yet those one has are always enough. 
They satisfy us completely. One has never met a 
man who would say, "I wish I had a friend who 

[3] 



Pipefuls 

would combine the good humour of A, the mystical 
enthusiasm of B, the love of doughnuts which is such 
an endearing quality in C, and who would also have 
the habit of giving Sunday evening suppers like D, 
and the well-stocked cellar which is so deplorably 
lacking in E." No; the curious thing is that at any 
time and in any settled way of life a man is generally 
provided with friends far in excess of his desert, and 
also in excess of his capacity to absorb their wisdom 
and affectionate attentions. 

There is some pleasant secret behind this, a secret 
that none is wise enough to fathom. The infinite 
fund of disinterested humane kindliness that is 
adrift in the world is part of the riddle, the insoluble 
riddle of life that is born in our blood and tissue. It 
is agreeable to think that no man, save by his own 
gross fault, ever went through life unfriended, with- 
out companions to whom he could stammer his 
momentary impulses of sagacity, to whom he could 
turn in hours of loneliness. It is not even necessary 
to know a man to be his friend. One can sit at a 
lunch counter, observing the moods and whims of the 
white-coated pie-passer, and by the time you have 
juggled a couple of fried eggs you will have caught 
some grasp of his philosophy of life, seen the quick 
edge and tang of his humour, memorized the shrewd- 
ness of his worldly insight and been as truly stimu- 
lated as if you had spent an evening with your 
favourite parson. 
[4] 



On Making Friends 

If ther^ were no such thing as friendship existing 
to-day, it would perhaps be diflficult to understand 
what it is like from those who have written about it. 
We have tried, from time to time, to read Emerson's 
enigmatic and rather frigid essay. It seems that 
Emerson must have put his cronies to a severe test 
before admitting them to the high-vaulted and 
rather draughty halls of his intellect. There are 
fine passages in his essay, but it is intellectualized, 
bloodless, heedless of the trifling oddities of human 
intercourse that make friendship so satisfying. He 
seems to insist upon a sterile ceremony of mutual 
self-improvement, a kind of religious ritual, a pro- 
found iaterchange of doctrines between soul and 
soul. His friends (one gathers) are to be antisepti- 
cated, all the poisons and pestilence of their faulty 
humours are to be drained away before they may 
approach the white and icy operating table of his 
heart. "Why insist," he says, "on rash personal 
relations with your friend.'' Why go to his house, or 
know his wife and family?" And yet does not the 
botanist like to study the flower in the soil where it 
grows.'* 

Polonius, too, is another ancient supposed to be 
an authority on friendship. The Polonius family 
must have been a thoroughly dreary one to live with; 
we have often thought that poor Ophelia would have 
gone mad anyway, even if there had been no Hamlet. 
Laertes preaches to Ophelia; Polonius preaches to 

[5] 



Pipefuls 

Laertes. Laertes escaped by going abroad, but the 
girl had to stay at home. Hamlet saw that pithy old 
Polonius was a preposterous and orotund ass. 
Polonius's doctrine of friendship — "The friends thou 
hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy 
soul with hoops of steel" — ^was, we trow, a necessary 
one in his case. It would need a hoop of steel to keep 
them near such a dismal old sawmonger. 

Friendships, we think, do not grow up in any such 
carefidly tended and contemplated fashion as 
Messrs. Emerson and Polonius suggest. They begin 
haphazard. As we look back on the first time we 
saw our friends we find that generally our original 
impression was curiously astray. We have worked 
along beside them, have consorted with them drunk 
or sober, have grown to cherish their delicious 
absurdities, have outrageously imposed on each 
other's patience — and suddenly we awoke to realize 
what had happened. We had, without knowing it, 
gained a new friend. In some curious way the un- 
seen border line had been passed. We had reached 
the final culmination of Anglo-Saxon regard when 
two men rarely look each other straight in the eyes 
because they are ashamed to show each other how 
fond they are. We had reached the fine flower and 
the ultimate test of comradeship — ^that is, when you 
get a letter from one of your "best friends," you 
know you don't need to answer it until you get ready 
to. 

[6] 



On Making Friends 

Emerson is right in saying that friendship can't be 
hurried. It takes time to ripen. It needs a back- 
gromid of humorous, wearisome, or even tragic 
events shared together, a certain tract of memories 
shared in common, so that you know that your own 
life and your companion's have really moved for 
some time in the same channel. It needs inter- 
change of books, meals together, discussion of one 




another's whims with mutual friends, to gain a 
proper perspective. It is set in a rich haze of half- 
remembered occasions, sudden glimpses, ludicrous 
pranks, unsuspected observations, midnight confi- 
dences when heart spoke to candid heart. 

The soxil preaches hmnility to itself when it 

[7] 



Pipefuls 

realizes, startled, tliat it has won a new friend. 
KJQOwing what a posset of contradictions we all are, 
it feels a symptom of shame at the thought that our 
friend knows all our frailties and yet thinks us worth 
affection. We aU have cause to be shamefast in- 
deed; for whereas we love ourselves in spite of our 
faults, our friends often love us even on accoxmt of 
our faults, the highest level to which attachment can 
go. And what an infinite appeal there is in their 
faces! How we grow to cherish those curious little 
fleshy cages — so oddly sculptm-ed — ^which iaclose the 
spirit withia. To see those faces, bent uncon- 
sciously over their tasks — each different, each 
unique, each so richly and queerly expressive of the 
lively and perverse enigma of man, is a full educa- 
tion in human tolerance. Privately, one studies his 
own ill-modeled visnomy to see if by any chance it 
bespeaks the emotions he inwardly feels. We know 
— as Hamlet did — the vicious mole of nature in us, 
the o'ergrowth of some complexion that mars the 
purity of our secret resolutions. Yet — our friends 
have passed it over, have shown their wiQuigness to 
take us as we are. Can we do less than hope to de- 
serve their generous tenderness, granted before it 
was earned? 

The problem of education, said R. L. S., is two- 
fold — "first to know, then to utter." Every man 
knows what friendship means, but few can utter that 
complete frankness of communion, based upon fviU 
[8] 



On Making Friends 

comprehension of mutual weakness, enlivened by a 
happy understanding of honoiu-able intentions 
generously shared. When we first met our friends 
we met with bandaged eyes. We did not know what 
jom-neys they had been on, what winding roads 
their spirits had travelled, what ingenious shifts they 
had devised to circumvent the walls and barriers of 
the world. We know these now, for some of them 
they have told us; others we have guessed. We 
have watched them when they little dreamed it; just 
as they (we suppose) have done with us. Every 
gesture and method of their daily movement have 
become part of our enjoyment of life. Not until a 
time comes for saying good-bye will we ever know 
how much we would like to have said. At those 
times one has to fall back on shrewder tongues. 
You remember HUaire Belloc: 

I From quiet homes and first beginning 
1 Out to the undiscovered ends, 

i There's nothing worth the wear of winning 
But laughter, and the love of friends. 



[91 



THOUGHTS ON CmER 




^UR friend Dove Dulcet, the poet, came into 
our kennel and found us arm in arm with a 
deep demijohn of Chester County cider. We 
poured him out a beaker of the cloudy amber juice. 
It was just in prime condition, sharpened with a 
blithe tingle, beaded with a pleasing bubble of froth. 
Dove looked upon it with a kindled eye. His 
arm raised the tumbler in a manner that showed 
this gesture to be one that he had compassed be- 
fore. The orchard nectar began to sluice down his 
throat. 
Dove is one who has faced many and grievous 

[10] 



Thoughts on Cider 

woes. His Celtic soul peers from behind cloudy 
curtains of alarm. Old unhappy far-off things and 
battles long ago fume in the smoke of his pipe. His 
girded spirit sees agrarian unrest in the daffodil and 
industrial riot in a tia of preserved prunes. He 
sees the world moving on the briok of horror and 
despair. Sweet dalliance with a baked bloater on a 
restaurant platter moves him to grief over the hard 
lot of the Newfoundland fishing fleet. Six cups of 
tea warm him to anguish over the peonage of Sir 
Thomas Lipton's coolies in Ceylon. Souls in 
perplexity cluster round him like Canadian dimes La 
a cash register in Plattsburgh, N. Y. He is a human 
sympathy trust. When we are on our deathbed we 
shall send for him. The perfection of his gentle sor- 
row will send us roaring out into the dark, and will 
set a valuable example to the members of our family. 

But it is the rack of clouds that makes the sunset 
lovely. The bosomy vapours of Dove's soul are the 
palette upon which the decumbent sun of his spirit 
casts its vivid orange and scarlet colours. His joy 
is the more perfect to behold because it bursts 
goldenly through the pangs of his tender heart. 
His soul is like the infant Moses, cradled among dark 
and prickly buUrushes; but anon it floats out upon 
the river and drifts merrily downward on a sparkling 
spate. 

It has nothing to do with Dove, but we will here 
interject the remark that a pessimist overtaken by 

[11] 



Pipefuls 

\ liquor is the cheeriest sight in the world. Who is so 
extravagantly, gloriously, and irresponsibly gay? 

Dove's eyes beaconed as the cider went its way. 
The sweet lingering tang filled the arch of his palate 
with a soft mellow cheer. His gaze fell upon us as 
his head tilted gently backward. We wish there 
had been a painter there — someone like F. Walter 
Taylor — to rush onto canvas the gorgeous benignity 
of his aspect. It would have been a portrait of the 
rich Flemish school. Dove's eyes were full of a 
tender emotion, mingled with a charmed and wistful 
surprise. It was as though the poet was saying he 
had not realized there was anything so good left on 
earth. His bearing was devout, religious, mystical. 
In one moment of revelation (so it appeared to us as 
we watched) Dove looked upon all the profiles and 
aspects of life, and found them of noble outline. 
Not since the grandest of Grand Old Parties went out 
of power has Dove looked less as though he felt the 
world were on the verge of an abyss. For several 
moments revolution and anarchy receded, profiteers 
were tamed, capital and labour purred together on a 
mattress of catnip, and the cosmos became a free 
verse poem. He did not even utter the customary 
and ungracious remark of those to whom cider 
potations are given: "That'll be at its best in 
about a week." We apologized for the cider being a 
little warmish from standing (discreetly hidden) 
under our desk. Douce man, he said: "I think 

■ [121 



Thouiijhts on Cider 



'to 



cider, like ale, ought not to be drunk too cold. I like 
it just this way." He stood for a moment, filled 
with theology and metaphysics. "By gracious," he 
said, "it makes all the other stuff taste like poison." 
Still he stood for a brief instant, transfixed with 
complete bliss. It was apparent to us that his mind 
was busy with apple orchards and autumn sunshine. 
Perhaps he was wondering whether he could make 
a poem out of it. Then he turned softly and went 
back to his job in a life insurance oflace. 

As for ourself, we then poured out another 
tumbler, lit a corncob pipe, and meditated. Falstaff 
once said that he had forgotten what the inside of a 
church looked like. There will come a time when 
many of us will perhaps have forgotten what the in- 
side of a saloon looked like, but there will still be the 
consolation of the cider jug. Like the smeU of 
roasting chestnuts and the comfortable equatorial 
warmth of an oyster stew, it is a consolation hard to 
put into words. It calls irresistibly for tobacco; in 
fact the true cider toper always pulls a long puff at 
his pipe before each drink, and blows some of the 
smoke into the glass so that he gulps down some of 
the blue reek with his draught. Just why this 
should be, we know not. Also some enthusiasts in- 
sist on having small sugared cookies with their 
cider; others cry loudly for Reading pretzels. Some 
have ingenious theories about letting the jug stand, 
either tightly stoppered or else unstoppered, until 

[13] 



Pipefuls 

it becomes "hard." In our experience hard cider is 
distressingly like drinking vinegar. We prefer it 
soft, with all its sweetness and the transfusing savour 
of the fruit animating it. At the peak of its delicious- 
ness it has a small, airy sparkle against the roof of the 
mouth, a delicate tactile sensation like the feet of 
dancing flies. This, we presume, is the 4| to 7 per 
cent, of sin with which fermented cider is credited by 
works of reference. There are pedants and bigots 
who insist that the jug must be stoppered with a 
corncob. For our own part, the stopper does not 
stay in the neck long enough after the demijohn 
reaches us to make it worth while worrying about 
this matter. Yet a nice attention to detail may 
prove that the cob has some secret affinity with 
cider, for a Missouri meerschaum never tastes so 
well as after three glasses of this rustic elixir. 

That ingenious student of social niceties, John 
Mistletoe, in his famous Dictionary of Deplorable 
Facts — a book which we heartily commend to the 
curious, for he includes a long and most infor min g 
article-on cider, tracing its etymology from the old 
Hebrew word shaker meaning "to quaff deeply" — 
maintains that cider should only be drimk beside an 
open fire of applewood logs: 

And preferably on an evening of storm and wet- 
ness, when the swish and sudden pattering of rain 
against the panes lend an added agreeable snugness 
to the cheerful scene within, where master and 

[14] 



Thoughts on Cider 

dame sit by the rosy hearth frying sausages in a 
pan laid on the embers. 

This reminds one of the anecdote related by ex- 
Senator Beveridge in his Life of John Marshall. 
Justice Story told his wife that the justices of the 
Supreme Court were of a self-denying habit, never 
taking wine except in wet weather. "But it does 
sometimes happen that the Chief Justice will say 
to me, when the cloth is removed, 'Brother Story, 
step to the window and see if it does not look like 
rain.' And if I tell him that the sun is shining 
brightly. Judge Marshall will sometimes reply, 'AH 
the better, for our jurisdiction extends over so large a 
territory that the doctrine of chances makes it cer- 
tain that it must be raining somewhere.'" 
I Our own theory about cider is that the time to 
I drink it is when it reaches you; and if it hails from 
Chester County, so much the better. 

We remember with gusto a little soliloquy on cider 
delivered by another friend of ours, as we both stood 
in a decent ordinary on Fulton Street, going through 
all the motions of jocularity and cheer. Cider (he 
said) is our refuge and strength. Cider, he in- 
sisted, drawing from his pocket a clipping much 
tarnished with age, is a drink for men of reason and 
genteel mu^tiu-e; a drink for such as desire to drink 
pleasantly, amiably, healthily, and with perseverance 
and yet' retain the command and superintendence of 

[15] 



Pipefuls 

their faculties. I have here (he continued) a clip- 
ping sent me by an eminent architect in the great 
city of Philadelphia (a city which it is a pleasure for 
me to contemplate by reason of the beauty and 
virtue of its women, the infinite vivacity and good 
temper of its men, the rectitudinal disposition of its 
highways) — I have here (he exclaimed) a clipping 
sent me by an architect of fame, charming parts, and 
infinite cellarage, explaining the virtues of cider. 
Cider, this clipping asserts, produces a clearness of 
the complexion. It brightens the eye, particularly 
in women, conducing to the composition of generous 
compliment and all the social suavity that endears 
the intercourse of the sexes. Longevity, this 
extract maintains, is the result of application to 
good cider. The Rev. Martin Johnson, vicar of 
Djlwyn, in Herefordshire, from 1651 to 1698 (he 
read from his clipping), wrote : 

This parish, wherein sider is plentifull, hath many 
people that do enjoy this blessing of long life; neither 
are the aged bedridden or decrepit as elsewhere; next to 
God, wee ascribe it to our flourishing orchards, first that 
the bloomed trees in spring do not only sweeten but 
purify the ambient air; next, that they yield us plenty 
of rich and winy liquors, which do conduce very much 
to the constant health of our inhabitants. Their 
ordinary course is to breakfast and sup with toast and 
sider through the whole Lent; which heightens their 
appetites and creates in them durable strength to 
labour. 

[16] 



Thoughts on Cider 

There was a pause, and our friend (he is a man of 
girth and with a brow bearing all the candor of a 
life of intense thought) leaned against the mahogany 
counter. 

That is very fine, we said, draining our chalice, and 
feeling brightness of eye, length of years, and durable 
strength to labour added to oiu* person. In the 
meantime (we said) why do you not drink the rich 
and winy liquor which your vessel contains? 

He folded up his clipping and put it away with a 
sigh. 

I always have to read that first, he Said, to make 
the damned stuff palatable. It will be ten years, he 
said, before the friend who sent me that clipping will 
have to drink any cider. 



[171 



ONE-NIGHT STANDS 




TO THOSE looking for an exhilarating vacation 
let us commend a week of "trouping" on one- 
night stands with a theatrical company, which 
mirthful experience has just been ours. We went 
along in the very lowly capacity of co-author, which 
placed us somewhat beneath the stage hands as far 
as dignity was concerned; and we flatter ourself that 
we have learned our station and observe it with due 
humility. The first task of the director who stages 
a play is to let the author know where he gets off. 
This was accomplished in our case by an argument 
concerning, a speech in the play where one of the 
[18] 



One-Night Stands 

characters remarks, "I propose to send a mental 
message to Eliza." This sounds (we contend) quite 
a harmless sentiment, but the director insisted that 
the person speaking, being an Englishman of 
studious disposition, would not say anything so in- 
accurate. "He would use much more correct 
language," said the director. "He ought to say 'I 
purpose to send.' " We balked mildly at this. "All 
right," said our mentor. "The trouble with you is 
you don't'know any English. I'll send you a copy of 
the Century dictionary." 

This gentleman carried purism to almost extrava- 
gant lengths. He objected to the customary 
pronunciation of "jew's-harp," insisting that the 
word should be "juice-harp," and instructing the 
actor who mentioned this innocent instrument of 
melody to write it down so in his script. When the 
dress rehearsal came round, he was surveying the 
"set" for the first act with considerable complacence. 
This scenery was intended to represent a very 
ancient English inn at Stratford-on-Avon, and one 
of the authors was heard to remark softly that it 
looked more like a broker's office on Wall Street. 
But the director was unshaken. "There's an old 
English inn up at Larchmont," said he, "and this 
looks a good deal like it, so I guess we're all right." 

Let any one who imagines the actor's life is one of 
bevo and skittles sally along with a new play on its 
try-out in the one-night circuit. When one sees the 

[19] 



Pipefuls 

delightful humour, fortitude, and high spirits with 
which the players face their task he gains a new 
respect for the profession. It is with a sense of 
shame that the wincing author hears his lines re- 
peated night after night — lines that seem to him to 
have grown so stale and disreputably stupid, and 
which the ingenuity of the players contrives to instill 
with life. With a sense of shame indeed does he 
reflect that because one day long ago he was struck 
with a preposterous idea, here are honest folk de- 
pending on it to earn daily bread and travelling on a 
rainy day on a local train on the Central New 
England Railway; here are 800 people in Saratoga 
Springs filing into a theatre with naive expectation 
on their faces. Amusing things happen faster than 
he can stay to count them. A fire breaks out in a 
cigar store a few minutes before theatre time. It is 
extinguished immediately, but half the town has 
rushed down to see the excitement. The cigar store 
is almost next door to the theatre, and the crowd 
sees the lighted sign and drops in to give the show 
the once-over, thus giving one a capacity house. 
Then there are the amusing accidents that happen on 
the stage, due to the inevitable confusion of one- 
night stands with long jumps each day, when 
scenery and props arrive at the theatre barely in 
time to be set up. In the third act one of the 
characters has to take his trousers out of a handbag. 
He opens the bag, but by some error no garments are 
[20] 



One-Night Stands 

within. Heavens! has the stage manager mixed up 
the bags? He has only one hope. The girhsh 
heroine's luggage is also on the stage, and our com- 
edian dashes over and finds his trousers in her bag. 
This casts a most sinister imputation on the adorable 
heroine, but our friend (blessings on him) contrives 
it so delicately that the audience doesn't get wise. 
Then doors that are supposed to be locked have a 
habit of swinging open, and the luckless heroLae, 
ready to say furiously to the hero, " Will you unlock 
the door.'*" finds herself facing an open doorway and 
has to invent a line to get herself off the stage. 

Going on the road is a very humanizing experience 
and one gathers a considerable respect for the small 
towns one visits. They are so brisk, so proud in 
their local achievements, so prosperous and so full of 
attractive shop- windows. When one finds in Johns- 
town, N. Y., for instance, a bookshop with almost as 
well-assorted a stock as one would see here in 
Philadelphia; or in Gloversville and Newburgh 
public libraries that would be a credit to any large 
city, one realizes the great tide of public intelligence 
that has risen perceptibly in recent years. At the 
hotel in GloversviUe the proprietress assured us that 
"an English duke" had just left who told her that he 
preferred her hotel to the BUtmore in New York. 
We rather wondered about this English duke, but we 
looked him up on the register and found that he was 
Sir H. Urnick of Fownes Brothers, the glove manu- 

[21] 



Pipefuls 

facturers, who have a factory in Gloversville. But 
then, being a glove manufacttn-er, he may have been 
kidding her, as the low comedian of our troupe 
observed. But the local pride of the small town is a 
genial thing. It may always be noted in the barber 
shops. The small-town barber knows his customers 
and when a strange face appears to be shaved on the 
afternoon when the bills are announcing a play, he 
puts two and two together. "Are you with that 
show?" he asks; and being answered in the aflSrma- 
tive (one naturally would not admit that one is 
merely there in the frugal capacity of co-author, and 
hopes that he will imagine that such a face might 
conceivably belong to the low comedian) he proceeds 
to expound the favourite doctrine that this is a wise 
burg. "Yes," he says, "folks here are pretty cagy. 
If your show can get by here you needn't worry 
about New York. Believe me, if you get a hand here 
you can go right down to Broadway. I always take 
in the shows, and I've heard lots of actors say this 
town is harder to please than any place they ever 
played." 

One gets a new viewpoint on many matters by a 
week of one-night stands. Theatrical billboards, for 
instance. We had always thought, in a vague kind 
of way, that they were a defacement to a town and 
cluttered up blank spaces in an unseemly way. 
But when you are trouping, the first thing you do, 
after registering at the hotel, is to go out and scout 
[22] 



One-Night Stands 

round the town yearning for billboards and com- 
plaining because there aren't enough of them. You 
meet another member of the company on the same 
errand and say, "I don't see much paper out," this 
being the technical phrase. You both agree that the 
advance agent must be loafing. Then you set out 
to see what opposition you are playing against, and 
emit groans on learning that "The Million Dollar 
Doll in Paris" is also in town, or "Harry Bulger's 
Girly Show" will be there the following evening, or 
Mack Seimett's Bathing Beauties in Person. 
"That's the kind of stuff they fall for," said the 
other author mournfully, and you hustle around to 
the box office to see whether the ticket rack is still 
fuU of xmsold pasteboard. 

At this time of year, when all the metropolitan 
theatres are crowded and there are some thirty 
plays cruising round in the offing waiting for a 
chance to get into New York and praying that some 
show now there will "flop," one crosses the trail of 
many other wandering troupes that are battering 
about from town to town. In remote Johnstown, 
N. Y., which can only be reached by troUey and 
where there is no hotel (but a very fine large theatre) 
one finds that Miss Grace George is to be the next 
attraction. On the train to Saratoga one rides on 
the same train with the Million DoUar Doll, and 
those who have seen her "paper" on the billboards 
in Newburgh or Poughkeepsie keep an attentive 

[23] 



Pipefuls 

optic open for the lady herself to see how nearly she 
lives up to her lithographs. And if the passerby 
should see a lighted window in the hotel glimmering 
at two in the morning, he will probably aver that 
there are some of those light-hearted "show people" 
carousing over a flagon of Virginia Dare. Little 
does he suspect that long after the tranquil thespians 
have gone to their well-earned hay, the miserable 
authors of the trying-out piece may be vigiluig to- 
gether, trying to dope out a new scene for the third 
act. The saying is not new, but it comes frequently 
to the lips of the one-night stander — It's a great life 
if you don't weaken. 



[24] 



THE OWL TRAIN 




ACROSS the cold moonlit landscapes, while 
-ZjL good folk are at home curling their toes in 
the warm bottom of the bed, the Owl trains rimable 
with a gentle drone, neither fast nor slow. 

There are several Owl trains with which we have 
been familiar. One, rather aristocratic of its kind, 
is the caravan of sleeping cars that leaves New York 
at midnight and deposits hustling business men of 
the most aggressive tjrpe at the South Station, Bos- 
ton. After a desolute progress full of incredible 
jerks and jolts these pilgrims reach this dampest, 
darkest, and most Arctic of all terminals about the 
time the morning codfish begins to warm his bosom 
on the gridirons of the sacred city. Another, a 
terrible nocturnal prowler, slips darkly away from 
Albany about 1 a. m., and rambles disconsolately 
and with shrill wailings along the West Shore line. 
Below the grim Palisades of the Hudson it wakes 

[25] 



Pipefuls 

painful echoes. Its first six units, as far as one can 
see in the dark, are blind express cars, containing 
milk cans and coffins. We once boarded it at Kings- 
ton, and after uneasy slumber across two facing 
seats found ourself impaled upon Weehawken three 
hours later. There one treads dubiously upon a ferry- 
boat in the fog and brume of dawn, imgluing eyelids 
in the bleak dividing pressure of the river breeze. 

But the Owl train we propose to celebrate is the 
vehicle that departs modestly from the crypt of the 
Pennsylvania Station in New York at half-past 
midnight and emits blood-shot wanderers at West 
Philadelphia at 3:16 in the morning. The railroad 
company, which thinks these problems out with 
nice care, lulls the passengers into unconsciousness 
of their woes not only by a gentle and even gait, a 
progress almost tender in its carefully modulated 
repression of speed, but also by keeping the cars at 
such an amazing heat that the victims promptly 
fade into a swoon. Nowhere will you see a more 
complete abandonment to the wild postures of 
fatigue and despair than in the pathetic sprawl of 
these human forms upon the simmering plush set- 
tees. A hot eddy of some varnish-tinctured 
vapour — certainly not air — rises from under the 
seats and wraps the traveller in a nightmarish trance. 
Occasionally he starts wildly from his dream and 
glares frightfully through the misted pane. It is 
the custom of the trainmen, who tiptoe softly 
[26] 



The Owl Train 

through the cars, never to disturb their cUents by 
caUing out the names of stations. When New- 
Brunswick is reached many think that they have 
arrived at West Philadelphia, or (worse still) have 
been carried on to Wilmington. They rush des- 
perately to the bracing chill of the platform to learn 
where they are. There Ls a mood of mystery about 
this Owl of ours. The traiiunen take a quaint 
delight in keeping the actual whereabouts of the 
caravan a merciful secret. 

Oddly assorted people appear on this train. 
Occasional haughty revellers, in evening dress and 
opera capes, api>ear among the humbler voyagers. 
For a time they stay on their dignity: sit bravely 
upright and talk with apparent intelligence. Then 
the drowsy poison of that stifled atmosphere over- 
comes them, too, and they fall into the weaknesb 
of their brethren. They turn over the opposing 
seat, elevate their nobler shins, and droop languid 
heads over the ticklish plash chair-back. Strange 
aliens lie spread over the seats. Nowhere will you 
see so many faces of curioas foreign carving. It 
seems as though many desperate exiles, who never 
travel by day, use the Owl for moving obscurely 
from city to city. This particular train Ls bound 
south to Washington, and at least half its tenants are 
citizens of colour. Even the endless gayety of our 
dusky brother is not proof against the venomous 
exhaustion of that boxed-in suffocation. The 

[27] 



Pipefuls 

ladies of his race are comfortably prepared for the 
liardships of the route. They wrap themselves in 
huge fur coats and all have sofa cushions to recline 
on. Even in an aU-night session of Congress you 
will hardly note so complete an abandonment of 
disillusion, weariness, and cynical despair as is 
written upon the blank faces aU down the aisle. 
Even the will-power of a George Creel or a WiU H. 
Hays would droop before this three-hour ordeal. 
Professor Einstein, who talks so delightfully of dis- 
carding Time and Space, might here reconsider his 
theories if he brooded, baking gradually upward, on 
the hot green plush. 

This genial Owl is not supposed to stop at North 
Philadelphia, but it always does. By this time 
Philadelphia passengers are awake and gathered in 
the cold vestibules, panting for escape. Some of 
them, against the rules of the train, manage to 
escape on the North Philadelphia platform. The 
rest, standing huddled over the swaying couplings, 
find the leisurely transit to West Philadelphia as 
long as the other segments of the ride put together. 
Stoically, and beyond the power of words, they lean 
on one another. At last the train slides down a grade. 
In the dark and pictiiresque tunnel of the West 
Philadelphia station, through thick mists of steam 
where the glow of the fire box paints the fog a golden 
rose, they grope and find the ancient stairs. Then they 
stagger off to seek a lonely car or a night-hawk taxi. 
[28] 



SAFETY PINS 




LIGATURE of infancy, healing engiae of emer- 
J gency, base and mainstay of our civilization 
— we celebrate the safety pin. 

What would we do without safety pins? Is it 
not odd to think, looking about us on our fel- 
lowmen (bearded realtors, ejaculatiag poets, plump 
and ruddy policemen, even the cheerful dusky 
creature who runs the elevator and whistles "Oh, 
What a Pal Was Mary" as the clock draws near 
6 p. M.) — aU these were first housed and swad- 
dled and made seemly with a paper of safety pins. 
How is it that the inventor who first conferred 
this great gift on the world is not known by name 
for the admiration and applause of posterity? Was 

[29] 



Pipefuls 

it not the safety pin that made the world safe for 
infancy? 

There will be some, mayhap, to set up the button 
as rival to the safety pin in service to humanity. 
But our homage bends toward the former. Not 
only was it our shield and buckler when we were too 
puny and impish to help ourselves, but it is also (now 
we are parent) symbol of many a hard-fought field, 
where we have campaigned all over the white count- 
erpane of a large bed to establish an lu-chin in his 
proper gear, while he kicked and scrambled, witless 
of our dismay. It is fortunate, pardee, that human 
memory does not extend backward to the safety 
pin era — ^happily the recording carbon sheet of the 
mind is not inserted on the roUer of exj>erience until 
after the singular humiliations of earliest childhood 
have passed. Otherwise our first recollection would 
doubtless be of the grimly flushed large face of a 
resolute jmrent, bending hotly downward in effort 
to make both ends meet while we wambled and 
waggled in innocent, maddening sport. In those 
days when life was (as George Herbert puts it) 
"assorted sorrows, anguish of all sizes," the safety 
pin was the only thing that raised us above the 
bandar-log. No wonder the antique schoolmen 
used to enjoy computing the number of angels that 
might dance on the point of a pin. But only arch- 
angels would be worthy to pirouette on a safety pin, 
which is indeed mightier than the sword. When 
[301 



Safety Pins 

Adam delved and Eve did spin, what did they do for 
a safety pin? 

Great is the stride when an infant passes from 
the safety pin period to the age of buttons. There 
are three ages of human beings in this matter: (1) 
Safety pins, (2) Buttons, (3) Studs, or (for females) 
Hooks and Eyes. Now there is an interim in the life 
of man when he passes away from safety pins, and, 
for a season, knows them not — save as mere con- 
venience in case of breakdown. He thinks of them, 
in his antic bachelor years, as merely the wrecking 
train of the sartorial system, a casual conjunction 
for pyjamas, or an impromptu hoist for small 
clothes. Ah! with humility and gratitude he greets 
them again later, seeing them at their true worth, 
the symbol of integration for the whole social fabric. 
Women, with their intuitive wisdom, are more 
subtle in this subject. They never wholly out- 
grow safety pins, and though they love to ornament 
them with jewellery, precious metal, and enamels, 
they are naught but safety pins after all. Some 
ingenious philosopher could write a full tractate on 
woman in her relation to pins — ^hairpins, clothes 
pins, rolling pins, hatpins. 

Only a bachelor, as we have implied, scoflFs at pins. 
Hamlet remarked, after seeing the ghost, and not 
having any Sir Oliver Lodge handy to reassure him, 
that he did not value his life at a pin's fee. Pope, we 
believe, coined the contemptuous phrase, "I care not 

[31] 



Pipefuls 

a pin." The pin has never been done justice in the 
world of poetry. As one might say, the pin has had 
no Pindar. Of course there is the old saw about see 
a pin and pick it up, all the day you'U have good luck. 
This couplet, barbarous as it is in its false rhyme, 
points (as Mother Goose generally does) to a pro- 
found truth. When you see a pin, you must pick 
it up. In other words, it is on the floor, where pins 
generally are. Their instinctive affinity for terra 
firma makes one wonder why they, rather than the 
apple, did not suggest the law of gravitation to some- 
one long before Newton. 

Incidentally, of course, the reason why Adam and 
Eve were forbidden to pick the apple was that it was 
supposed to stay on the tree until it fell, and Adam 
would then have had the credit of spotting the 
principle of gravitation. 

Much more might be said about pins, touching 
upon their curious capacity for disappearing, super- 
stitions concerning them, usefulness of hatpins or 
hairpins as pipe-cleaners, usefulness of pins to school- 
boys, both when bent for fishing and when filed to an 
extra point for use on the boy in the seat in front 
(honouring him in the breech, as Hamlet would have 
said) and their curious habits of turning up in un- 
expected places, undoubtedly caught by pins in their 
long association with the lovelier sex. But of these 
useful hyphens of raiment we will merely conclude 
by saying that those interested in the pin industry 
[32] 



Safety Pins 

will probably emigrate to England, for we learn from 
the Encyclopaedia Britannica that in that happy 
island pins are cleaned by being boiled in weak beer. 
Let it not be forgotten, however, that of all kinds, 
the safety is the King Pin. 



[33] 



CONFESSIONS OF A "COLYUMIST" 




I CAN not imagine any pleasant job so full of 
pangs, or any painful job so full of pleasures, 
as the task of conducting a newspaper column. 

The colyumist, when he begins his job, is dis- 
heartened because nobody notices it. He soon out- 
grows this, and is disheartened because too many 
people notice it, and he imagines that all see the 
paltriness of it as plainly as he does. There is 
[34] 



Confessions of a "Colyumist" 

nothing so amazing to him as to find that any one 
really enjoys his "stuff." Poor soul, he remembers 
how he groaned over it at his desk. He remembers 
the hours he sat with lack-lustre eye and addled 
brain, brooding at the sluttish typewriter. He re- 
members the flush of shame that tingled him as he 
walked sadly homeward, thinking of some atro- 
cious inanity he had sent upstairs to the composing- 
room. It is a job that engenders a healthy humility. 
I had always wanted to have a try at writing a 
column. Heaven help me, I think I had an idea that 
I was born for the job. I may as well be candid. 
There was a time when I seriously thought of insert- 
ing the following ad in a Philadelphia newspaper. 
I find a memorandum of it in my scrap-book: 

Humorist: Young and untamed, lineal descendent 
of Eugene Field, Frank Stockton, and Francois 
Rabelais, desires to run a column in a Philadelphia 
newspaper. A guaranteed circulation-getter. 

Said Humorist can also supply excellent veins of 
philosophy, poetry, satire, uplift, glad material 
and indiscriminate musings. Remarkable oppor- 
tunity for any newspaper desiring a really unusual 
editorial feature. Address Humorist, etc. 

So besotted was I, I would have paid to have this 
printed if I had not been counselled by an older and 
wiser head. 

I instance this to show that the colyumist is likely 
to begin his job with the conception that it is to be a 

[35] 



Pipefuls 

perpetual uproar of mirth and high spirits. This 
lasts about a week. He then learns, in secret, to take 
it rather seriously. He has to deal with the most 
elusive and grotesque material he knows — his own 
mind; and the unhappy creature, everlastingly prob- 
ing himseK in the hope of discovering what is so 
rare in minds (a thought), is likely to end in a fer- 
ment of bitterness. The happiest times in life are 
when one can just live along and enjoy things as they 
happen. If you have to be endlessly speculating, 
watching, and making mental notes, your brain- 
gears soon get a hot box. The original of all para- 
graphers — ^Ecclesiastes — came very near ending as a 
complete cynic; though in what F. P. A. would call 
his "lastline," he managed to wriggle into a more 
hopeful mood. 

The first valuable discovery that the colyumist is 
likely to make is that aU minds are very much the 
same. The doctors tell us that all patent medicines 
are built on a stock formula — a sedative, a purge, and 
a bitter. If you are to make steady column-topers 
out of your readers, your daily dose must, as far as 
possible, average up to that same prescription. If you 
employ the purge aU the time, or the sedative, or the 
acid, your clients wUl soon ask for something with 
another label. 

Don Marquis once wrote an admirable little poem 
called "A Colyumist's Prayer." Mr. Marquis, who 
is the king of aU colyumists, realizes that there is 
[36] 



Confessions of a "Colyumist" 

what one may call a religious side in colyumizing. 
It is hard to get the colyumist to admit this, for he 
fears spoofing worse than the devil; but it is emi- 
nently true. If I were the owner of a newspaper, I 
think I wotild have painted up on the wall of the local 
room the following words from Isaiah, the best of all 
watchwords for all who write: 

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; 
that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; 
that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! 

The most painful privilege of the colyumist's job 
is the number of people who drop in to see him, 
usually when he is imprecating his way toward the 
hour of going to press. This is all a part of the great 
and salutary human instinct against work. When 
people see a man toiling, they have an irresistible im- 
pxilse to crowd round and stop him. They seem to 
imagine that he has been put there on purpose to help 
them solve their problems, to find a job for their 
friend from Harrisburg, or to tell them how to find a 
publisher for their pyoems. Unhappily, their victim 
being merely human, is likely to grow a bit snappish 
under infliction. Yet now and then he gets a 
glimpse into a human vexation so sincere, so honest, 
and so moving that he turns away from the type- 
writer with a sigh. He wonders how one dare ap- 
proach the chronicling of this muddled panorama 
with anything but humility and despair. Frank 

[37] 



Pipefuls 

Harris once said of Oscar Wilde: "If England in- 
sists on treating her criminals like this, she doesn't 
deserve to have any." Similarly, if the public in- 
sists on bringing its woes to its colyumists, it doesn't 
deserve to have any colyumists. Then the battered 
jester turns again to his machine and ticks oflf some- 
thing like this: 

We have heard of ladies who have been tempted be- 
yond their strength. We have also seen some who 
have been strengthened beyond their temptation. 

Of course there are good days, too. (This is not 
one of them.) Days when the whole course of the 
news seems planned for the benefit of the chaffish and 
irreverent commentator. When Governor Hobby of 
Texas issues a call for the state cavalry. When one 
of your clients drops in, in the goodness of his heart, 
to give you his own definition of a pessimist — a 
pessimist, he says, is a man who wears both belt and 
suspenders. When a big jewellery firm in the city 
puts out a large ad — 

Bailey, Banks & Biddle Company 

Watches for Women 

Of Superior Design and Perfection 

of Movement 

all that one needs to do to that is to write over it the 
caption 

so DO WE ALL 

and pass on to the next paragraph. 
[38] 



Confessions of a "Colyumisf 

The more a colyumist is out on the streets, making 
himself the reporter of the moods and oddities of 
men, the better his stuff will be. It seems to me that 
his job ought to be good training for a novelist, 
as it teaches him a habit of human sensitiveness. 
He becomes filled with an extraordinary curiosity 
about the motives and purj>oses of the people he 
sees. The other afternoon I was very much struck 
by the unconscious pathos of a little, gentle-eyed 
old man who was standing on Chestnut Street 
studying a pocket note-book. His umbrella leaned 
against a shop-window, on the sill of which he had 
laid a carefully rolled-up newspaper. By his feet 
was a neat leather brief-case, plumply filled with 
contents not discernible. There he stood (a 
sort of unsuccessful Cyrus Curtis), very dimin- 
utive, his gray hair rather long abaft his neck, 
his yellowish straw hat (with curly brim) tilted 
backward as though in perplexity, his timid and 
absorbed blue eyes poring over his memorandum- 
book which was full of pencilled notes. He had a 
slightly unkempt, brief beard and whiskers, his 
cheek-bones pinkish, his linen a little frayed. There 
was something strangely pathetic about him, and I 
would have given much to have been able to speak 
to him. I halted at a window farther down the 
street and studied him; then returned to pass him 
again, and watched him patiently. He stood quite 
absorbed, and was still there when I went on. 

[39] 



Pipefuls 

That is just one of the thousands of vivid little 
pictures one sees on the city streets day by day. To 
catch some hint of the meaning of all this, to present 
a few scrawled notes of the amazing interest and 
colour of the city's life, this is the colyumist's task as 
I see it. It is a task not a whit less worthy, less 
painful, or less baffling than that of the most con- 
scientious novelist. And it is carried on in siu*- 
roundings of extraordinary stimulation and difficulty. 
It is heart-racking to struggle day by day, amid 
incessant interruption and melee, to snatch out 
of the hurly-bm-ly some shreds of humour or pathos 
or (dare one say.'') beauty, and phrase them in- 
telligibly. 

But it is fun. One never buys a package of to- 
bacco, crosses a city square, enters a trolley-car or 
studies a shop-window without trying, in a baffled, 
hopeless way, to peer through the frontage of the 
experience, to find some glimmer of the thoughts, 
emotions, and meanings behind. And in the long 
run such a habit of inquiry must bear fruit in under- 
standing and sympathy. Joseph Conrad (who 
seems, by the way, to be more read by newspaper 
men than any other writer) put very nobly the pin- 
nacle of all scribblers' dreams when he said that 
human affairs deserve the tribute of "a sigh which 
is not a sob, a smile which is not a grin." 

So much, with apology, for the ideals of the 
colyumist, if he be permitted to speak truth without 
[40] 



Confessions of a *'Colyuniist" 

fear of mockery. Of course in the actual process and 
travail of his job you will find him far different. 
You may know him by a sunken, brooding eye; 
clothing marred by much tobacco, and a chafed and 
tetchy humour toward the hour of five p. m. Having 
bitterly schooled himself to see men as paragraphs 
walking, he finds that his most august musings have 
a habit of stewing themselves down to some ferocious 
or jocular three-line comment. He may yearn des- 
perately to compose a really thrilling poem that will 
speak his passionate soul; to churn up from the 
typewriter some lyric that wlU rock with blue seas 
and frantic hearts; he finds himself allaying the 
frenzy with some jovial sneer at Henry Ford or a 
jyell about the High Cost of Living. Poor soul, he 
I is like one condemned to harangue the vast, idiotic 
/ world through a keyhole, whence his anguish issues 
thin and faint. Yet who will say that all his labour 
is whoUy vain.? Perhaps some day the government 
will crown a Colyumist Laureate, some majestic 
sage with ancient patient blue eyes and a snowy 
beard nobly stained with nicotine, whose utterances 
will be heeded with shuddering respect. All minor 
colyumists will wear robes and sandals; they wUl be 
an order of scofl^g friars; people will run to them 
on crowded streets to lay before them the sorrows 
and absurdities of men. And in that day 

The meanest paragraph that blows wiU give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for sneers. 

[41] 



MOVING 




MAN, we suspect, is the only animal capable of 
persuading himself that his hardships are 
medicine to the soul, of flattering himself into a con- 
viction that some mortal spasm was a fortifying 
discipline. 

Having just moved our household goods for the 
fourth time in four years, we now find ourself in the 
singular state of trying to believe that the horrors of 
the event have added to our supply of spiritual 
resignation. Well, let us see. 

The brutal task of taking one's home on trek is (we 
[42] 



Moving 

can argue) a stirring tonic, a kind of private rehearsal 
of the Last Judgment, when the sheep shall be 
divided from the shoats. What coxild be a more con- 
vincing reminder of the instability of man's affairs 
than the harrowing upheaval of our cherished 
properties? Those dark angels, the moving men, 
how heartless they seem in their brisk and resolute 
dispassion — ^yet how exactly they prefigure the 
implacable sternness of the ultimate shepherds. A 
strange life is theirs, taking them day after day into 
the bosom of homes prostrated by the emigrating 
throe. Does this matter-of-fact bearing conceal an 
infinite tenderness, a pity that dare not show itself 
for fear of unmanly collapse? Are they secretly 
broken by the sight of the desolate nursery, the dis- 
mantled crib, the forgotten clockwork monkey 
lying in a corner of the cupboard where the helpless 
Urchin laid it with care before he and his smaller 
sister were deported, to be out of the way in the final 
storm? Does the o'ermastering pathos of a modest 
household tiu-ned inside out, its tender vitals dis- 
played to the passing world, wring their breasts? 
Stoic men, if so, they well conceal their pangs. 

They have one hopelessly at a disadvantage. In 
the interval that always elapses before the arrival of 
the second van, there is a little social chat and utter- 
ance of reminiscences. There is a lively snapping of 
matchheads on thumbnails, and seated at ease in the 
debris of the dismantled living room our friends will 

[43] 



Pipefuls 

tell of the splendour of some households they have 
moved before. The thirty-eight barrels of gilt 
porcelain, the twenty cases of oil paintings, the satin- 
wood grand piano that their spines twinge to recall. 
Once our furnitures were moved by a crew of lusty 
athletes who had previously done the same for Mr. 
Ivy Lee, and while we sat in shamed silence we heard 
the tale of Mr. Lee's noble possessions. Of what 
avail would it have been for us to protest that we love 
our stuff as much as Mr. Lee did his? No, we had a 
horrid impulse to cry apology, and beg them to hurl 
the things into the van anyhow, just to end the agony. 
This interval of social chat being prolonged by the 
blizzard, the talk is likely to take a more ominous 
turn. We are told how, only last week, a sister van 
was hit by a train at a crossing and carried a himdred 
yards on the engine pilot. Two of the men were 
killed, though one of these lived from eleven o'clock 
Saturday morning imtil eleven o'clock Monday 
night. How, after hearing this, can one ask what 
happened to the furniture, even if one is indecent 
enough to think of it.f* Then one learns of another of 
the fleet, stalled in a drift on the way to Harrisburg, 
and hasn't been heard from for forty-eight hours. 
Sitting in subdued silence, one remembers something 
about "moving accidents by flood and field," and 
thanks fortune that these pitiful oddments are only 
going to a storage warehouse, not to be transported 
thence until the kindly season of spring. 
[44] 



Moving 

But packing for storage instead of for moving 
implies subtler and more painful anguishes. Here 
indeed we have a tonic for the soul, for election must 
be made among one's belongings: which are to be 
stored, and which to accompany? Take the subject 
of books for instance. Horrid hesitation: can we 
subsist for four or five months on nothing but the 
"Oxford Book of English Verse" and BosweU's John- 
son? SuppM3se we want to look up a quotation, in 
those late hoiu"s of the night when all really worth- 
while reading is done? Our memory is knitted with 
a wide mesh. Suppose we want to be sure just what 
it was that Shakespeare said happened to him in his 
"sessions of sweet silent thought," what are we going 
to do? We will have to faU back on the customary 
recourse of the minor poet — if you can't remember 
one of Shakespeare's sonnets, at least you can write 
one of your own instead. Speaking of literature, it 
is a curious thing that the essayists have so neglected 
this topic of moving. It would be pleasant to know 
how the good and the great have faced this peculiarly 
terrible crisis of domestic affairs. When the Bard 
himself moved back to Stratford after his years in 
London, what did he think about it? How did he 
get all his papers packed up, and did he, in mere 
weariness, destroy the half-done manuscripts of 
plays? Charles Lamb moved round London a good 
deal; did he never -wT-ite of his experience? We like 
to think of Emerson: did he ever move, and if so, 

[45] 



Pipefuls 

how did he behave when the fatal day came? Did 
he sit on a packing case and utter sepulchral aph- 
orisms? Think of Lord Bacon and how he would 
have crystallized the matter in a phrase. 

Of course in bachelor days moving may be a huge 
lark, a humorous escapade. We remember some 
high-spirited young men, three of them, who were 
moving their chattels from rooms on Twenty-first 
Street to a flat on Irving Place. Frugality was 
their necessary watchword, and they hired a push- 
cart in which to transport the dunnage. It was 
necessary to do this on Simday, and one of the trio, 
more sensitive than the others, begged that they 
should rise and accomplish the public shame early in 
the morning, before the streets were alive. In 
particiJar, he begged, let the route be chosen to 
avoid a certain club on Gramercy Park where he had 
many friends, and where he was loath to be seen 
pushing his humble intimacies. The others, scent- 
ing sport, and brazenly hardy of spirit, contrived to 
delay the start on one pretext or another until the 
middle of the forenoon. Then, by main force, 
ignoring his bitter protest, they impelled the stagger- 
ing vehicle, grossly overloaded, past the very door of 
the club my friend had wished to avoid. Here, by 
malicious inspiration, they tilted the wain to one 
side and strewed the paving with their property. 
They skipped nimbly roimd the corner, and with 
highly satisfactory laughter watched their blushing 
[46] 



Moving 

partner labouring dismally to coUect the fragments. 
Some of his friends issuing from the club lent a hand, 
and the joy of the conspirators was complete. 

But to the family man, moving is no such airy 
picnic. Sadly he goes through the last dismal rites 
and sees the modest fragments of his dominion 
hustled toward the cold sepulture of a motor van. 
Before the toughened bearing of the hirelings he 
doubts what manner to assume. Shall he stand at 
the front door and exhort them to particular care 
with each sentimental item, crying "Be careful with 
that little chair; that's the one the Urchin uses when 
he eats his evening prunes!" Or shall he adopt a 
gruesome sarcasm, hoping to awe them by conveying 
the impression that even if the whole van should be 
splintered in collision, he can get more at the nearest 
department store? Whatever policy he adopts, they 
will not be much impressed. For, when we handed 
our gratuity, not an xmgenerous one, to the driver, 
asking him to divide it among the gang, we were 
startled to hear them burst into loud screams of 
mirth. We asked, grimly, the cause. It appeared 
that during the work one of our friends, apparently 
despairing of any pourboire appropriate to his own 
conceptions of reward, had sold his share of the tip 
to the driver for fifteen cents. We are not going to 
say how much he lost by so doing. But this gamble 
put the driver in such a good humour that we believe 
he wiU keep away from railroad crossings. 

[47] 



SURF FISHING 




ALL day long you see them stand thigh-deep in 
the surf, fishing. Up on the beach each one 
has a large basket containing clams for bait, extra 
hooks and leaders, a little can of oil for the reel, and 
any particular doo-dads dear to the heart of the 
individual fisherman. And an old newspaper, all 
ready to protect the anticipated catch from the rays 
of the Sim. 

Some of them wear bathing suits; others rubber 
hip-boots, or simply old clothes that won't mind 
getting wet. If they are very full of swank they 
will have a leather belt with a socket to hold the 
butt of the rod. Every now and then you will see 
them pacing backward up the beach, reeling in the 
[48] 



Surf Fishing 

line. They will mutter something about a big 
strike that time, and he got away with the bait. 
With zealous care they spear some more clam on the 
hook, twisting it over and over the barb so as to be 
firmly impaled. Then, with careful precision, they 
fling the line with its heavy pyramid sinker far out 
beyond the line of breakers. 

There they stand. What do they think about, 
one wonders? But what does any one think about 
when fishing? That is one of the happy pastimes 
that don't require much thinking. The long ridges 
of surf crumble about their knees and the sun and 
keen vital air lull them into a cheerful drowse of the 
faculties. Do they speculate on the never-ending 
fascination of the leaning walls of water, the rhyth- 
mical melody of the rasp and hiss of the water? Do 
they watch that indescribable beauty of the breaking 
wave, a sight as old as humankind and yet never 
so described that one who has not seen it could 
picture it? 

The wave gathers height and speed as it moves 
toward the sand. It seems to pull itself together for 
the last plunge. The first wave that ever roUed up to 
a beach probably didn't break. It just slid. It was 
only the second wave that broke — curled over in that 
curious way. For our theory — which may be 
entirely wrong — is that the breaking is due to the 
undertow of previous waves. After a wave sprawls 
up on the beach, it runs swiftly back. This receding 

[49] 



Pipefuls 

undercurrent — ^you can feel it very strongly if you 
are swimming just in front of a large wave about to 
break — digs in beneath the advancing hUl of water. 
It cuts away the foundations of that hill, which 
naturally topples over at the crest. 

The wave of water leans and hangs for a delaying 
instant. The actual cascade may begin at one end 
and run along the length of the ridge; it may begin 
at both ends and twirl inward, meetiag in the 
middle; it may (but very rarely) begin in the middle 
and work outward. As the billow is at its height, be- 
fore it combs over, the fisherman sees the sunlight 
gleaming through it — an ecstasy of perfect lucid 
green, with the glimmer of yellow sand behind. 
Then, for a brief moment — so brief that the details 
can never be memorized — he sees a clear crystal 
screen of water falling forward. Another instant, 
and it is all a boil of snowy suds seething about his 
legs. He may watch it a thousand times, a million 
times; it wiU never be old, never wholly familiar. 
Colour varies from hour to hour, from day to day. 
Sometimes blue or violet, sometimes green-olive or 
gray. The backwash tugs at his boots, hollowing 
out little channels under his feet. The sun wraps 
him round like a mantle; the salt crusts and thickens 
in his hair. And then, when he has forgotten every- 
thing save the rhythm of the falling waves, there 
comes a sudden tug 

He reels in, and a few curious bathers stand still 
[50] 



Surf Fishing 

in the surf to see what he has got. They are indined 
to be scornful. It is such a little fish! One would 
think that such a vast body of water would be 
ashamed to yield only so small a prize. Never mind. 
He has compensations they wot not of. Moreover — 
although he would hardly admit it himself — ^the 
fishing business is only a pretext. How else could a 
grown man with grizzled hair have an excuse to 
stand aU day paddling in the surf? 



[51] 



'IDOLATRY" 




ONCE in a while, when the name of R. L. S. is 
mentioned in conversation, someone says to 
us: "Ah well, you're one of the Stevenson idolators, 
aren't you?" And this is said with a curious air of 
cynical superiority, as of one who has experienced all 
these things and is superbly tolerant of the shallow 
mind that can still admire Tusitala. His work 
(such people will generally tell you) was brilliant 
but "artificial" . . . and for the true certifi- 
cated milk of the word one must come along to such 
modern giants as Dreiser and Hergesheimer and 
Cabell. For these artists, each in his due place, we 
have only the most genial respect. But when the 
passion of our youth is impugned as "idolatry" we 
feel in our spirit an intense weariness. We feel the 
[52] 



"Idolatry" 

pacifism of the wise and secretive mind that remains 
tacit when its most perfect inward certainties are 
assailed. One does not argue, for there are certain 
things not arguable. One shrugs. After all, what 
human gesture more eloquent (or more satisfying to 
the performer) than the shrug? 

There is a little village on the skirts of the Forest 
of Fontainebleau (heavenly region of springtime and 
romance!) where the crystal-green eddies of the 
Loing slip under an old gray bridge with sharp angled 
piers of stone. Near the bridge is a quiet little inn, 
one of the many happy places in that country long 
frequented by artists for painting and " villSgiature." 
Behind the inn is a garden beside the river-bank. 
The salle a manger, as in so many of those inns at 
Barbizon, Moret, and the other Fontainebleau 
villages, is panelled and frescoed with humorous and 
high-spirited impromptus done by visiting painters. 

In the summer of 1876 an anxious rumour passed 
among the artist colonies. It was said that an 
American lady and her two children had arrived at 
Grez, and the young bohemians who regarded this 
region as their own sacred retreat were startled and 
alarmed. Were their chosen haunts to be invaded 
by tourists — and tourists of the disturbing sex? 
Among three happy irresponsibles this humorous 
anxiety was particularly acute. One of the trio Was 
sent over to Grez as a scout, to spy out the situation 
and report. The emissary went, and failed to 

[53] 



Pipefuls 

return. A second explorer was dispatched to study 
the problem. He, too, was swallowed up in silence. 
The third, impatiently waiting tidings from his 
faithless friends, set out to make an end of this 
mystery. He reached the inn at dusk: it was a 
gentle summer evening; the windows were open to 
the tender air; lamps were lit within, and a merry 
party sat at dinner. Through the open window 
the suspicious venturer saw the recreant ambassa- 
dors, gay with laughter. And there, sitting in the 
lamplight, was the American lady — a slender, 
thoughtful enchantress with eyes as dark and glow- 
ing as the wine. Thus it was that Robert Louis 
Stevenson first saw Fanny Osbourne. 

A few days later Mrs. Osbourne's eighteen-year- 
old daughter Isobel wrote in a letter: "There is a 
young Scotchman here, a Mr. Stevenson. He is 
such a nice-looking ugly man, and I would rather 
listen to him talk than read the most interesting 
book. . . . Mama is ever so much better and is 
getting prettier every day." 

"The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson," 
written by her sister Mrs. Sanchez (the mother of 
"little Louis Sanchez on the beach at Monterey" 
remembered by lovers of "A Child's Garden of 
Verses") is a book that none of the so-called idolators 
will want to overlook. The romantic excitements 
of R. L. S.'s youth were tame indeed compared 
to those of Fanny Van de Grift. R. L. S. had 
[54] 



"Idolatry'* 

been thrilled enough by a few nights spent in the 
dark with the docile ass of the Cevennes; but here 
was one, sprung from sober Philadelphia blood, 
born in Indianapolis and baptized by Henry Ward 
Beecher, who had pioneered across the fabled 
Isthmus, lived ra the roaring mining camps of 
Nevada, worked for a dressmaker in Frisco, and 
ventm-ously taken her yoimg children to Belgium 
and France to study art. She had been married at 
seventeen, had already once thought herself to be 
a widow in fact by the temporary disappearance 
of her first husband; and was now, after enduring 
repeated infidelities, prepared to make herseK a 
widow in law. Daring horse woman, a good shot, 
a supreme cook, artist, writer, and a very Gene 
Stratton Porter among flowers, fearless, beautiful, 
and of unique charm — ^where could another woman 
have been found so marvellously gifted to be the 
wife of a romancer.^' It seems odd that Philadelphia 
and Edinburgh, the two most conservatively minded 
cities of the Anglo-Saxon earth, should have com- 
bined to produce this, the most radiant pair of 
adventurers in oiu" recent annals. 

The reading of this delightful book has taken us 
back into the very pang and felicity of our first great 
passion — our idolatry, if you will — ^which we are 
proud here and now to re-avow. When was there 
ever a happier or more wholesome worship for a boy 
than the Stevenson mania on which so many of this 

[55] 



Pipefuls 

generation grew up? We were the luckier in that 
our zeal was shared in all its gusto and particularity 
by a lean, long-legged, sallow-faced, brown-eyed 
eccentric (himself incredibly Stevensonian in ap- 
pearance) with whom we lay afield in our later teens, 
reading R. L. S. aloud by the banks of a small stream 
which we vowed should become famous in the world 
of letters. And so it has, though not by our efforts,^ 
which was what we had designed; for at the crystal 
headwater of that same creek was penned "The 
Amenities of Book Collecting," that enchanting 
volume of bookish essays which has swelled the corre- 
spondence of a Philadelphia business man to insane 
proportions, and even brought him offers from three 
newspapers to conduct a book page. It seems ap- 
propriate to the present chronicler that in a quiet 
library overlooking the clear fount and origin of 
dear Darby Creek there are several of the most 
cherished association volumes of R. L. S. — we think 
particularly of the "Child's Garden of Verses" 
which he gave to Cummy, and the manuscript of 
little "Smoutie's" very first book, the "History of 
Moses." 

Was there ever a more joyous covenant of affec- 
tion than that of Mifflin McGill and ourself in ovu* 
boyish madness for Tusitala-f* It is a happy circum- 
stance, we say, for a youth, before the multiplying 
responsibilities of maturity press upon him, to pour 
[56] 



'^Idolatry" 

out his enthusiasm in an obsession such as that; and 
when this passion can be shared and doubled and 
knitted in partnership with an equally freakish, in- 
sane, and innocent idiot (such as our generously naad 
friend Mifflin) admirable adventvu-es are sure to 
follow. The quest begun on Darby Creek took us 
later on an all-summer progress among places in 
England and Scotland hallowed to us by association 
with R. L. S. Never, in any young lives past or to 
come, could there be an instant of purer excitement 
and glory than when, after bicycling hotly all day 
with the blue outline of Arthur's Seat apparently 
always receding before us, we trundled grimly into 
Auld Reekie and set out for the old Stevenson home 
at 17 Heriot Row, halting only to bestow our 
pneumatic steeds in the nearest and humblest avail- 
able hostelry. There (for we found the house 
empty and "To Let") we sat on the doorstep even- 
ing by evening, smoking in the long northern 
twihght and spinning our youthful dreams. This 
lust for hunting out our favourite author's footsteps 
even led one of the pair to a place perhaps never 
visited by any other Stevensonian pilgrim — old 
Cockfield Rectory, in Suffolk, where Mrs. Sitwell 
and Sidney Colvin first met the bright-eyed Scotch 
boy in 1873. The tracker of footprints remembers 
how kind were the then occupants of the old rectory, 
and how, in a daze of awe, he trod the green and 
tranquil lawn and hastened to visit a cottage near by 

[571 



Pipefuls 

where there was an ancient rustic who had been 
coachman at the rectory when R. L. S. stayed there, 
fabled to retain some pithy recollection. Alas, the 
Suffolk ancient, eager enough to share tobacco and 
speech, would only miill over his memories of a 
previous rector, describing how it had fallen to him 
to prepare the good man for burial; how he smiled in 
death and his cheeks were as rosy as a babe's. 

It would take many pages to narrate all the 
bypaths and happy excursions trod by these simple 
youths in their quest of the immortal Louis. The 
memories come bustling, and one knows not where to 
stop. The supreme adventure, for one of the pair, 
lay in the kindness of Sir Sidney Colvin. To this 
prince of gentlemen and scholars one of these lads 
wrote, sending his letter (with subtle cunning) from 
a village in Suffolk only a few miles from Sir Sidney's 
boyhood home. He calculated that this might 
arouse the interest of Sir Sidney, whom he knew to 
be cruelly badgered with letters from enthusiasts; 
and fortime turned in his favour, granting him 
numerous ecstatic visits to Sir Sidney and Lady 
Colvin and much unwarranted generosity. But, 
since our mind has been turned in this direction by 
Mrs. Sanchez's book, it might be appropriate to add 
that one of the most thrilling moments in the crusade 
was a season of April days spent beside the green and 
stripling Loing, in the forest of Fontainebleau region, 
visiting those lovely French villages where R. L. S. 
[58] 



"Idolatry" 

roamed as a yoirng man, crowned by an afternoon 
at Grez. One remembers the old gray bridge across 
the eddying water, and the door of the inn where the 
young pilgrim lingered, trying to visualize scenes of 
thirty-five years before. 

It is not mere idolatry when the hearts of the 
young are haunted by such spells. There was some 
real divinity behind the enchantment, some mar- 
vellous essence that made all roads Tusitala trod the 
Road of Loving Hearts. In these matters we would 
trust the simple Samoans to come nearer the truth 
than our cynic friend in Greenwich Village. The 
magic of that great name abides xmimpaired. 



[59] 



THE FIRST COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 

{Delivered to Cain and Abel, the first gradvMing class 
c/ the Garden of Eden Normal School.) 




MY YOUNG FRIENDS— It is a privilege to be 
permitted to address you this morning, for 
I am convinced that never in the world's history did 
the age beckon with so eager a gesture to the young 
men on the threshold of active life. Never indeed in 
the past, and certainly never in the future, was there 
or will there be a time more deeply fraught with 
significance. And as I gaze upon your keen faces it 
seems almost as though the world had amassed all 
the problems that now confront us merely in order 
to give you tasks worthy of your prowess. 

The world, I think I may safely say, is smaller now 
than ever before. The recent invention of young 
[60] 



First Commencement Address 

women, something quite new in the way of a social 
problem, has introduced a hitherto undreamed-of 
complexity into human affairs. The extreme 
rapidity with which ideas and thoughts now circu- 
late, due to the new invention of speech, makes it 
probable that what is said in Eden to-day will be 
known in the land of Nod within a year. The 
greatest need is plainly for big-visioned and purpose- 
ful men, eflScient men, men with forward-looking 
minds. I hope you will pattern after your admir- 
able father in this respect; he truly was a forward- 
looking man, for he had nothing to look back on. 

You are aware, however, that your father has had 
serious problems to deal with, and it is well that you 
should consider those problems in the light of the 
experiences you are about to face. One of his most 
perplexing difficulties would never have come upon 
him if he had not fallen into a deep sleep. I counsel 
you, therefore, be wary not to overslumber. The 
prizes of life always come to those who press reso- 
lutely on, imdaunted by fatigue and discouragement. 
Another of yom- father's failings was probably due to 
the fact that he was never a small boy and thus had 
no chance to work the deviltry out of his system. 
You yourselves have been abundantly blessed in this 
regard. I think I may say that here, in our Normal 
Academy, you have had an almost ideal playground 
to work off those boyish high spirits, to perpetrate 
those mischievous pranks that the world expects of 

[61] 



Pipefuls 

its young. Remember that you are now going out 
into the mature work of life, where you will en- 
coimter serious problems. 

As you wend your way from these accustomed 
shades into the full glare of public life you will do so, 
I hoj>e, with the consciousness that the eyes of the 
world are upon you. The sphere of activity in 
which you may find yourselves called up>on to per- 
form may be restricted, but you will remember that 
not failiwe but low aim is base. You will hold a just 
balance between the conflicting tendencies of radical- 
ism and conservatism. You will endeavour to 
secure for labour its due share in the profits of labom". 
You will not be forgetful that all government de- 
pends in the last resort on the consent of the gov- 
erned. These catch words in the full flush of your 
youth you may be inclined to dismiss as truisms, but 
I assure you that 10,000 years from now men will be 
uttering them with the same air of discovery. 

It is my great pleasure to confer upon you both 
the degree of bachelor of arts and to pray that you 
may never bring discredit upon your alma mater. 



62] 



THE DOWNFALL OF GEORGE SNIPE 

GEORGE SNIPE was an ardent book-lover, and 
sat in the smoking car in a state of susi>ended 
ecstasy. He had been invited out to Mandrake 
Park to visit the library of Mr. Genial Girth, the 
well-known collector of rare autographed books. 
Devoted amateur of literature as he was, George's 
humble career rarely brought him into contact with 
bookish treasures, and a tremulous excitement swam 
through his brain as he thought of the glories 
he was about to see. In his devout meditation the 
train carried him a station beyond his alighting 
place, and he ran frantically back through the well- 
groomed suburban countryside in order to reach Mr. 
Girth's home on time. 

They went through the library together. Mr. 
Girth displayed all his fascinating prizes with 
generous good nature, and George grew excited. 
The palms of his hands were clammy with agitation. 
All round the room, encased in scarlet slip-covers of 
tooled morocco, on fireproof shelves, were the price- 
less booty of the collector. Here was Charles 
Lamb's "Essays of Elia," inscribed by the author to 
the woman he loved. Here was a copy of "Paradise 

[63] 



Pipefuls 

Lost," signed by John Milton. Here was a "Ham- 
let" given by Shakespeare to Bacon with the in- 
scription, "Dear Frank, don't you wish you could 
have written something like this?" Here was the 
unpublished manuscript of a story by Robert Louis 
Stevenson. Here was a note written by Doctor 
Johnson to the landlord of the Cheshire Cheese, 
refusing to pay a bill and accusing the tavern-keeper 
of profiteering. Here were volumes autographed by 
Goldsmith, Keats, Shelley, Poe, Byron, DeFoe, Swift, 
Dickens, Thackeray, and all the other great figures 
of modern literature. 

Poor George's agitation became painful. His 
head buzzed as he sm-veyed the faded signatures of 
all these men who had become the living figures of 
his day-dreams. His eye rolled wildly in its orbit. 
Just then Mr. Girth was called out of the room, and 
left George alone among the treasures. 

Just at what instant the mania seized him we 
shall never know. There were a pen and an inkpot 
on the table, and the frenzied lover of books dipped 
the quiU deep in the dark blue fluid. He ran 
eagerly to the shelves. The first volume he saw was 
a copy of "Lorna Doone." In it he wrote "Affec- 
tionately yours, R. D. Blackmore." Then came 
Longfellow's poems. He scrawled "With deep 
esteem, Henry W. Longfellow " on the flyleaf. 
Then three volumes of Macaulay's "History of 
England." In the first he jotted "I have always 
[64] 



Downfall of George Snipe 

waxited you to have these admirable books, T. B. 
M." In "The Mill on the Floss" he wrote "This 
comes to you still warm from the press, George 
Eliot." The next book happened to be a copy of 
Edgar Guest's poems. In this he inscribed "You 
are the host I love the best. This is my boast. Yours, 
Edgar Guest." In a copy of Browning's Poems he 
wrote "To my dear and only wife, Elizabeth, from 
her devoted Robert." In a pamphlet reprint of the 
Gettysburg Speech he penned "This is straight stuff, 
A. Liacoln." But perhaps his most triumphant 
exploit was signing a copy of the Rubaiyat thus: 
"This book is given to the Anti-Saloon League of 
Naishapur by that thorn in their side, O. Khayyam." 
By the time the ambulance reached Mr. Girth's 
home George was completely beyond control. He 
was taken away screaming because he had not had a 
chance to autograph a copy of the "Songs of Solo- 



[05 



MEDITATIONS OF A BOOKSELLER 

(Roger Mifflin loquitur) 




I HAD a pleasant adventure to-day. A free verse 
poet came in to see me, wanted me to buy some 
copies of "The Pagan Anthology." I looked over 
the book, to which he himself had contributed some 
pieces. I advised him to read Tennyson. I wish 
you could have seen his face. 

If you want to see a really good anthology (I said) 
[66] 



Meditations of a Bookseller 

have a look at Pearsall Smith's "Treasury of English 
Prose," just out. The only thing that surprises me 
is that Mr. Smith didn't include some free verse in it. 
The best thing about free verse is that it is often aw- 
fully good prose. 

It's a sup>erb clear night: a milky pallor washed 
in the blue: a white moon overhead: stars rare 
but brilliant, one in the south twinkles and flutters 
like a tiny flower stirred by faint air. The wind is 
"a cordial of incredible virtue" (Emerson) — sharp 
and chill, but with a milder tincture. To-day, 
though brisk and snell on the streets, the sunshine 
had a lively vigour, a generous quality, a promissory 
note of the equinox. I felt it from first rising this 
morning — the old demiurge at work ! As I sat in the 
bathtub (when a man is fifty he may be pardoned for 
taking a warm bath on winter mornings) my mind 
fell upon the desire of wandering: it occurred to me 
that a spread of legs in the vital air would be richly 
repaid. The windows called me: as soon as shirt 
and trousers were on, I was at the siU p)eering out 
over Gissing Street. Later, even through closed 
panes, the chink of milk bottles on the pavement 
below seemed to rise with a clearer, merrier note. 
Setting out for some tobacco about 8:30, 1 stopped to 
study the ice-man's great blocks of silvery translu- 
cence, lying along the curb by a big apartment house. 
"Artificial" ice, I suppose: it was interesting to 
see, in the meridian of each cake, a kind of silvery 

[67] 



Pipefuls 

fracture or membrane, with the grain of air-bubbles 
tending outward therefrom — showing, no doubt, if 
one knew the mechanics of refrigeration, just how 
the freezing proceeded. Even in so humble a thing 
as a block of ice are these harmonic and lovely 
patterns, the seal of Nature's craft, inscrutable, 
inimitable. I might have made a point of this in 
talking to that free verse poet. I'm glad I didn't, 
however: he would have had some tedious reply, 
convincing to himself. That's the trouble with 
replies: they are always convincing to the replier. 
As a friend of mine used to say, one good taciturn 
deserves another. 

I was thinking, as I took a parcel of laundry up to 
the Chinaman on McFee Street just now, it would 
be interesting to write a book dealing solely, candidly, 
exactly, and fully with the events, emotions, and 
thoughts of just one day in a man's life. If one 
could do that, in a way to carry conviction, assent, 
and reality, to convey to the reader's senses a 
recognition of genuine actual human being, one 
might claim to be a true artist. 

I have foimd an admirable book for reading in 
bed — this little anthology of prose, collected by 
PearsaU Smith. He knows what good prose is, 
having written some of the daintiest bits of our time 
in his "Trivia," a book with which I occasionally 
delight a truly discerning customer. What a 
fascination there is in good prose — "the cool element 
[68] 



Meditations of a Bookseller 

of prose" as Milton calls it — a sort of fluid happiness 
of the mind, unshaken by the violent pangs of great 
poetry. I am not subtle enough to describe it, but 
in the steadily cumulating satisfaction of first-class 
prose there seems to be something that speaks direct 
to the braixi, unmarred by the claims of the senses, 
the emotions. I meditate much, ignorantly and 
fumblingly, on the modes and purposes of writing. 
It is so simple — "Fool!" said my Muse to me "look in 
thy heart and write!" — all that is needful is to tell 
what happens; and yet how hard it is to summon up 
that necessary candor. Every time I read great 
work I see the confirmation of what I grope for. 
How vivid, straight, and cleanly it seems when done: 
merely the outward utterance of "what the mind at 
home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath 
liberty to propose to herself." Let a man's mind 
depart from his audience; let him have no concern 
whether to shock or to please. Let him carry no 
consideration save to utter, with unsparing fidelity, 
what passes in his own spirit. One can trust the 
brain to do its part. All that is needed is honour- 
able frankness: not to be ashamed to open our 
hearts, to speak our privy weakness, our inward 
exulting. Then the pain and perplexity, or the 
childish satisfactions, of our daily life are the true 
material of the writer's art, and that which is sown 
in weakness may be raised in power. Curious indeed 
that in this life, brief and precariously enjoyed, men 

[69] 



Pipefuls 

should so set their hearts on building a permanence 
in words : something to stand, in the lovely stability 
of ink and leaden types, as our speech out of silence 
to those who follow on. Indefensible absurdity, and 
yet the secret and impassioned dream of those who 
write! 

I was about to say that, for the writing of anything 
truly durable, the first requisite is plenty of silence. 
Then I recall Dr. Johnson's preface to his Dic- 
tionary — "written not in the soft obscurities of 
retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, 
but amid inconvenience and distraction, in sickness 
and in sorrow," 



[70] 



IF BUYING A MEAL WERE LIKE BUY- 
ING A HOUSE 

®|)i£S Snbenture 

between A. B., an innkeeper, organized and existing 
under the laws of good cooking, party of the first 
part, and C. D., party of the second part, witnesseth: 

^Ipfu^l- the said party of the first part, for and in 
■^ consideration of the sum of $1.50, lawful 
money of the United States, paid by the said party 
of the second part, does hereby grant and release 
unto the said C. D., and his heirs, administrators, 
and assigns forever, 

(^W that certain group, parcels, or allotments of 
'^'^*' food, viands, or victuals, situate or to be 
spread, served, and garnished upon the premises of 
said A. B., shown and known and commonly de- 
signed as one square meal, table d'hote, together 
with the drinking water, napkin, ash tray, finger- 
bowl and hat-and-coat-hanging privileges or ease- 
ments appurtenant thereto, 

[71] 



Pipefuls 

opportunities (as an easement additionally appur- 
tenant to the meal above nominated) to partake, eat, 
enjoy, and be nourished upon said victuals, and to 
call for extra pats, parcels, or portions of butter. 

^Mlfli^ri* *^ the following restrictions, to wit: 
' That neither the party of the second 

part, nor his heirs, executors, or assigns, will feast 
immoderately upon onions, to the confusion of his 
neighbours; nor will the said C. D. or his guests 
smoke any form of tobacco other than cigars 
and cigarettes, the instrument commonly known 
as a pipe being offensive to the head waiter 
(a man of delicate nurture) ; nor will said party of the 
second part covet, retain, nor seek to remove any 
knives, forks, spoons, or other tableware whatsoever; 
nor is anything said or implied or otherwise inti- 
mated in this covenant to be construed as permitting 
the party of the second part to carry on loud 
laughter, song, carnival, nor social uproar; nor un- 
necessarily, further than is tactful for the procure- 
ment of expeditious attention, to endear himself to 
or otherwise cajole, compliment, and ingratiate the 
waitress. 



^ni> jFurtfjermore, 



that title to said 

Meal does not 

pass until the party of the second part has conveyed, 

of his mansuetude and proper charity, a gratuity, fee, 

[72] 



Buying a Meal 

honorarium, lagniappe, pourboire, easement or tip 
of not less than 15 per cent, of the price of said 
Meal; which easement, while customarily spoken of 
as a free-will grant or gratuity, is to be constructively 
regarded as an entail and a necessary encumbrance 
upon said Meal. 

^jf^^s^ the said party of the first part covenants 
-vi-llU Tff[i}i the said party of the second part as 
follows: That the said C. D. is seized of the said 
Meal in fee simple, and shall quietly enjoy said Meal 
subject to the covenants and restrictions and 
encumbrances hereinbefore set out, subject to the 
good pleasure of the Head Waiter. 



3n Wlitnt^^ "m^tvtot 



are signed, 
(LOC. SIG.) 



[73] 



ADVENTURES IN HIGH FINANCE 




THERE is no way in which one can so surely 
arouse the suspicions of bankers as by trying to 
put some money in their hands. We went round to 
a near-by bank hoping to open an account. As we 
had formerly dealt with an uptown branch of the 
same institution, and as the cheque we wanted to 
deposit bore the name of a quite well-known firm, 
we thought all would be easy. But no; it seemed 
that there was no convincing way to identify our- 
self . Hopefully we pulled out a stack of letters, but 
[74] 



Adventures in High Finance 

these were waved aside. We began to feel more and 
more as though we had come with some sinister in- 
tent. We started to light our pipe, and then it oc- 
curred to us that perhaps that would be regarded as 
the gesture of a hardened cracksman, seeking to 
appear at his ease. We wondered if, in all our 
motions, we were betraying the suspicious conduct 
of the professional embezzler. Perhaps the courteous 
banker was putting us through some Freudian 
third degree ... in these days when the 
workings of the unconscious are so shrewdly can- 
vassed, was there anything abominable in the cellar 
of our sovd which we were giving away without 
realizing . . . had we not thought to ourseU, 
as we entered the door, well, this is a fairly decent 
cheque to start an account with, but we won't keep 
our balance anywhere near that figure . . . per- 
haps our Freudian banker had spotted that thought 
and was sending for a psychological patrol wagon 
. . . well, how could we identify ourself? Did 
we know any one who had an accoimt in that 
branch? No. 

We thought of a friend of ours who banked at an- 
other branch of this bank, not far away. The 
banker called him up and whispered strangely over 
the phone. We were asked to take off our hat. 
Apparently our friend was describing us. We 
hoped that he was saying "stout" rather than "fat." 
But it seemed that the corroboration of our friend 

[75] 



Pipefuls 

only increased our host's precaution. Perhaps he 
thought it was a carefully worked-out con game, 
in which ovu* friend was a confederate. We signed 
our name several times, on little cards, with a 
desperate attempt to appear unconcerned. In spite 
of our best efforts, we could not help thinking that 
each time we wrote it we must be looking as though 
we were trying to remeihber how we had written it 
the last time. Still the banker hesitated. Then he 
called up our friend again. He asked him if he 
would know our voice over the phone. Our friend 
said he would. We spoke to our friend, with whom 
we had eaten lunch a few minutes before. He 
asked, to identify us, what we had had for limch. 
Horrible instant! For a moment we could not re- 
member. The eyes of the banker and his assistant 
were glittering upon us. Then we spoke glibly 
enough. "An oyster patty," we said; "two cups of 
tea, and a rice pudding which we asked for cold, but 
which was given us hot." 

Our friend asserted, to the banker, that we were 
imdeniably us, and indeed the homely particularity 
of the luncheon items had already made incision in 
his hardened bosom. He smiled radiantly at us and 
gave us a cheque book. Then he told us we couldn't 
draw against our account until the original cheque 
had passed through the Clearing House, and sent a 
youth back to the office with us so that we could be 
unmistakably identified. 
[76] 



Adventures in High Finance 

As we left the banker's office someone else was 
ushered in. "Here's another gentleman to open 
an account," said the assistant. "We hope he 
knows what he had for lunch," we said to the 
banker. 



[77] 



ON VISITING BOOKSHOPS 




IT IS a curious thing that so many people only go 
into a bookshop when they happen to need some 
particular book. Do they never drop in for a little 
innocent carouse and refreshment? There are some 
knightly souls who even go so far as to make their 
visits to bookshops a kind of chivalrous errantry at 
large. They go in not because they need any certain 
volume, but because they feel that there may be 
[78] 



On Visiting Bookshops 

some book that needs them. Some wistful, little 
forgotten sheaf of loveliness, long pining away on 
an upper shelf — ^why not ride up, fling her across your 
charger (or your charge account), and gallop away. 
Be a little knightly, you booklovers! 

The lack of intelligence with which people use 
bookshops is, one supposes, no more flagrant than the 
lack of intelligence with which we use all the rest of 
the machinery of civilization. In this age, and 
particularly in this city, we haven't time to be 
intelligent. 

A queer thing about books, if you open your 
heart to them, is the instant and irresistible way they 
follow you with their appeal. You know at once, if 
you are clairvoyant in these matters (libre-voyant, 
one might say), when you have met yom* book. You 
may dally and evade, you may go on about your 
affairs, but the paragraph of prose your eye fell 
upon, or the snatch of verses, or perhaps only the 
spirit and flavour of the volume, more divined than 
reasonably noted, will follow you. A few lines 
glimpsed on a page may alter your whole trend of 
thought for the day, reverse the currents of the 
mind, change the profile of the city. The other 
evening, on a subway car, we were reading Walter de 
la Mare's interestmg little essay about Rupert 
Brooke. His discussion of children, their dreaming 
ways, their exalted simplicity and absorption, 
changed the whole tenor of our voyage by some 

[79] 



Pipefuls 

magical chemistry of thouglit. It was no longer a 
wild, barbaric struggle with our fellowmen, but a 
venture of faith and recompense, taking us home to 
the bedtime of a child. 

The moment when one meets a book and knows, 
beyond shadow of doubt, that that book must be 
his — not necessarily now, but some time — is among 
the happiest excitements of the spirit. An in- 
describable virtue effuses from some books. One 
can feel the radiations of an honest book long before 
one sees it, if one has a sensitive pulse for such 
affairs. Its honour and truth will speak through 
the advertising. Its mind and heart will cry 
out even underneath the extravagance of jacket- 
blurbings. Some shrewd soul, who understands 
books, remarked some time ago on the editorial 
page of the Sun's book review that no superlative on 
a jacket had ever done the book an atom of good. 
He was right, as far as the true bookster is concerned. 
We choose our dinner not by the wrappers, but by 
the veining and gristle of the meat within. The 
other day, prowling about a bookshop, we came upon 
two paper-bound copies of a little book of poems by 
Alice Meynell. They had been there for at least 
two years. We had seen them before, a yea,r or more 
ago, but had not looked into them fearing to be 
tempted. This time we ventured. We came upon 
two poems— "To O, Of Her Dark Eyes," and "A 
Wind of Clear Weather in England." The book 
[80] 



On Visiting Bookshops 

was ours — or rather, we were its, though we did not 
yield at once. We came back the next day and got 
it. We are still wondering how a book like that 
could stay in the shop so long. Once we had it, the 
day was different. The sky was sluiced with a 
clearer blue, air and sunlight blended for a keener 
intake of the lungs, faces seen along the street moved 
us with a livelier shock of interest and surprise. The 
wind that moved over Sussex and blew Mrs. Mey- 
nell's heart into her lines was still flowing across the 
ribs and ledges of our distant scene. 

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets 
it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal 
adventure it is an experience of great social import. 
Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to 
tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, 
adds it to the postscript of all manner of com- 
munications, intrudes it into telephone messages, 
and insists on his friends writing down the title of the 
find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once 
certain of his conquest, "I want you to love her, 
too!" It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little 
indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered 
the book, too. He sees an enthusiastic review — very 
likely in The New Republic — and says, with great 
scorn, "I read the book three months ago." There 
are even some perversions of passion by which a 
booklover loses much of his affection for his pet if he 
sees it too highly commended by some rival critic. 

[81] 



Pipefuls 

This sharp ecstasy of discovering books for one's 
self is not always widespread. There are many who, 
for one reason or another, prefer to have their books 
found out for them. But for the complete zealot 
nothing transcends the zest of pioneering for him- 
self. And therefore working for a publisher is, to a 
certain type of mind, a never-failing fascination. 
As H. M. Tomlinson says in "Old Junk," that 
fascinating collection of sensitive and beautifully 
poised sketches which came to us recently with a 
shock of thrilling delight: 

To come upon a craft rigged so, though at her 
moorings and with sails furled, her slender poles 
upspringing from the bright plane of a brimming 
harbour, is to me as rare and sensational a delight 
as the rediscovery, when idling with a book, of a 
favourite lyric. 

To read just that passage, and the phrase the 
bright plane of a brimming harbour, is one of those 
"rare and sensational delights" that set the mind 
moving on lovely journeys of its own, and mark off 
visits to a bookshop not as casual errands of reason, 
but as necessary acts of devotion. We visit book- 
shops not so often to buy any one special book, but 
rather to rediscover, in the happier and more 
expressive words of others, our own encumbered 
soul. 



[82 



A DISCOVERY 




WE ARE going to tell the truth. It has been on 
our mind for some time. We are going to tell 
it exactly, without any balancing or trimming or 
crimped edges. We are weary of talking about 
trivialities and are going to come plump and plain 
to the adventures of our own mind. These are real 
adventures, just as real as the things we see. The 
green frog that took refuge on our porch last night 
was no more real. Perhaps frogs don't care so much 
for wet as they are supposed to, for when that 
excellent thunderstorm came along and the ceiling of 
the night was sheeted with lilac brightness, through 
which ran quivering threads of naked fire (not just 
the soft, tame, flabby fire of the domestic hearth, but 

[83] 



Pipefuls 

the real core and marrow of flame, its hungry, 
terrible, destroying self), our friend the frog came 
hopping up on the porch where we stood, apparently 
to take shelter. How brilliant was his black and 
silver eye when we picked him up! His direct and 
honourable regard somehow made us feel ashamed, 
we know not why. And yet we have plenty to be 
ashamed about — but how did he know? He was 
still on the porch this morning. Equally real was 
the catbird on the hedge as we came down toward 
the station. She — we call her so, for there was 
unmistakable ladyhood in her delicately tailored 
trimness — she bickered at us in a cheerful way, on 
top of those bushes which were so loaded with the 
night's rainfall that they shone a blurred cobweb 
gray in the lifting light. Her eye was also dark and 
polished and lucid, like a bead of ink. It also had 
the same eflfect of tribulation on om* spirit. Neither 
the catbird nor the frog, we said to ourseK, would 
have tormented their souls trying to "invent" 
something to write about. They would have told 
what happened to them, and let it go at that. So, as 
we walked along under an arcade of maple trees, ad- 
miring the little green seed-biplanes brought down 
by the thrash of the rain — they look rather as though 
they would make good coathangers for fairies — ^we 
asked ourseK why we could not be as straightforward 
as the bird and the frog, and talk about what was in 
our mind. 
[84] 



A Discovery 

The most exciting thing that happened to us when 
we got to New York last February was finding a book 
in a yellow wrapper. Its title was "Old Junk," 
which appealed to us. The name of the author was 
H. M. Tomlinson, which immediately became to us 
a name of honour and great meaning. All days and 
every day intelligent men find themselves sur- 
rounded by oceans of what is quaintly called "read- 
ing matter." Most of it is turgid, Imnpy, fuzzy in 
texture, squalid in intellect. The rewards of the 
literary world — that is, the tangible, potable, 
spendable rewards — ^go mostly to the cheapjack and 
the moimtebank. And yet here was a man who in 
every paragraph spoke to the keenest intellectual 
sense — ^who, ten times a page, enchanted the reader 
with the surprising and delicious pang given by the 
critically chosen word. We sat up late at night 
reading that book, marvelling at our good fortune. 
We wanted to cry aloud (to such as cared to imder- 
stand), "Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for here is 
bom a man who knows how to write!" In our 
exuberance we seized a pen and wrote in the stern of 
our copy: "Here speaks the Lord God of prose; 
here is the clear eye, the ironic mind, the compassion- 
ate heart; the thrilling honesty and (apparent) 
simplicity of great work." Then we set about 
making the book known to omr friends. We pro- 
pelled them into bookshcps and made them buy it. 
We took our own copy down to William McFee on 

[851 



Pipefuls 

S. S. Turrialba and a glad heart was ours when he, 
too, said it was "the real thing." This is a small 
matter, you say? When the discovery of an honest 
pen becomes a small matter life wiU lose something of 
its savour. Those who understand wiU understand; 
let the others spend their time in the smoker playing 
pinochle. Those who care about these things can 
get the book for themselves. 

Of Mr. Tomlinson in person: he is a London news- 
paperman, we understand, and now on tlie staff of 
the London Nation. (Trust Mr. Massingham, the 
editor of that journal, to know an honest writer 
when he sees him.) Mr. TomlLason says of him- 
self? 

My life is like my portrait. It won't bear in- 
vestigation. I am not conscious of having done 
anything that would interest either a policeman or 
the yoimg lady of the kind who dotes on Daddy 
Long Legs; worse luck. It's about time I got down 
to business and did something interesting either to 
one or the other. That is why it won't bear in- 
vestigation, this record of mine. I am about as 
entertaining as one of the crowd coming out of the 
factory gates with his full diimer paU. All my 
adventures have been no more than keeping that 
pail moderately full. I've been doing that since I 
was twelve, in all sorts of ways. I was an office boy 
and a clerk among London's ships, in the last days 
of the clippers. And I am forced to recall some of 
the things — ^such as bookkeeping in a jam factory 
and stoking on a tramp steamer — I can understand 

[86] 



A Discovery 

why I and my fellows, without wanting to, drifted 
about in indecision till we drifted into war and 
drifted iato peace. And of course, I've been a 
joiu-nalist. I am still; and so have seen much of 
Africa, America, and Europe, without knowing 
exactly why. I was in France in 1914 — the August, 
too, of that year, and woke up from that nightmare 
in 1917, after the Vimy Ridge attack, when I re- 
turned to England to sit with my wife and children 
in a cellar whenever it was a fine night and listened 
to the guns and bombs. God, who knows all, might 
make something of this sort of inconsequential 
drift of one day into the next, but I give it 
up. 

But now we pass to the phase of the matter that 
puzzles us. How is it that there are some books 
which can never have abiding life until they perish 
and are born again.? We have noticed it so often. 
There is a book of a certain sort to which this 
process seems inevitable. One need only mention 
Leonard Merrick or Samuel Butler as examples. 
The book, we wiU. suppose, has some peculiar 
subtlety or flavour of appeal. (We are thinking at 
the moment df WUliam McFee's "Letters From an 
Ocean Tramp.") It is published and falls dead. 
Later on — ^usually about ten years later — it is taken 
up with vigour by some other publisher, the stone is 
rolled away from the sepulchre, and it begins to move 
among its destined lovers. 

This remark is caused by our delighted discovery 

[871 



Pipefuls 



J of a previous book by the author of "Old Junk." 
*'The Sea and the Jungle" is the title of it, the tale 
of a voyage on the tramp steamer Capella, from 
Swansea to Para in the Brazils, and thence 2,000 
miles along the forests of the Amazon and Madeira 
rivers. It is the kind of book whose readers will 
never forget it; the kind of book that happens to 
some happy writers once in a lifetime (and to many 
never at all) when the moving hand seems gloriously 
in gear with the tremidous and busy mind, and all 
the spinning earth stands hearkeningly still waiting 
for the perfect expression of the thought. It is the 
work of a hand trained in laborious task-work and 
then set magnificently free, for a few blessed months, 
tmder no burden save that of putting its captaining 
spirit truthfully on paper. And this book — in 
which there is a sea passage that not even Mr. Con- 
rad has ever bettered — this book, which makes the 
utmost self-satisfied heroics of the Prominent 
Writers of omr market place shrivel uncomfortably 
in remembrance — this book, we repeat, though 
published in this country in 1913, has been long out 
of print; and the copy which we were lucky enough 
to lay hand on through the courtesy of the State 
Librarian of Pennsylvania had not previously been 
borrowed since November 18, 1913. Someone asks 
us if this man can really write. Let us choose a 
paragraph for example. This deals with the first 
day at sea of the tramp steamer Capella: 
[88] 



A Discovery 

It was December, but by luck we found a halcyon 
morning which had got lost in the year's procession. 
It was a Sunday morning, and it had not been 
ashore. It was stiU virgin, bearing a vestal light. 
It had not been soiled yet by any suspicion of this 
trampled planet, this muddy star, which its innocent 
and tenuous rays had discovered in the region of 
night. I thought it still was regarding us as a 
lucky find there. Its light was tremulous, as if with 
joy and eagerness. I met this discovering morning 
as your ambassador while you still slept, and be- 
trayed not, I hope, any grayness and bleared satiety 
of ours to its pure, frail, and lucid regard. That was 
the last good service I did before leaving you quite. 
I was glad to see how well your old earth did meet 
such a light, as though it had no difficulty in looking 
day in the face. The world was miraculously 
renewed. It rose, and received the newborn of 
Aurora in its arms. There were clouds of pearl 
above hiUs of chrysoprase. The sea ran in volatile 
flames. The shadows on the bright deck shot to and 
fro as we rolled. The breakfast bell rang not too 
soon. This was a right beginning. 

The above is a paragraph that we have chosen 
from Mr. Tomlinson's book almost at random. We 
could spend the whole afternoon (and a happy after- 
noon it woxild be for us) copying out for you passages 
from "The Sea and the Jungle" that would give you 
the extremity of pleasure, O high-spirited reader! 
It is an odd thing, it is a quaint thing, it is a thing 
that would seem inconceivable (were we not toler- 
ably acquaint with the vagaries of the reading 

[89] 



Pipefuls 

public) that a book of this sort should lie perdu on 
the shelves of a few libraries. Yet one must not 
leap too heartily to the wrong conclusion. The 
reading public is avid of good books, but it does not 
hear about them. Now we would venture to say 
that we know fifty people — ^nay, two hundred and 
fifty — ^who w^ould never have done thanking us if we 
coidd lay a copy of a book of this sort in their hand. 
They would thinlc it the greatest favour we could do 
them if we could tell them where they could go and 
lay down honest money and buy it. And we have to 
retort that it is out of print, not procurable.* Is it the 
fault of publishers.'' We do not think so — or not 
very often. For every publisher has experience of 
this sort of thing — books that he knows to be of 
extraordinary quality and fascination which simply 
lie like lead in his stockroom, and people wiU not 
listen to what he says about them. Whose fault 
is it, then.'' Heaven knows. 



*Since this was written, a new edition has been published by E. P. 
Button & Co. 



[90] 



SILAS OREIN HOWES 

THERE died in New York, on February 11, 
1918, one who perhaps as worthily as any man 
in any age represented the pecuUar traits and 
charms of the book-lover, a man whose personal love- 
liaess was only equalled by his imassuming modesty, 
a man who was an honour to the fine old profession of 
bookseUing. 

There will be some who frequent Brentano's 
bookstore in New York who will long remember the 
quiet little gentleman who held the post nearest the 
front door, whose face lit with such a gentle and 
gracious smile when he saw a friend approach, who 
endured with patience and courtesy the thousand 
small annoyances that every salesman knows. 
There were encounters with the bourgeois customer, 
there were the exhausting fatigues of the rush 
season, there were the day-long calls on the slender 
and none too robust frame. But through it all he 
kept the perfect and unassuming grace of the high- 
born gentleman he was. An old-fashioned courtesy 
and gallantry moved in his blood. 

It was an honour to know Silas Orrin Howes, and 
some have been fortunate to have disclosed to them 

[91] 



Pipefuls 

the richness and simple bravery of that lover of 
truth and beauty. The present writer was one of 
the least and latest of these. Twice, during the 
last months of his life, it was my very good fortune to 
spend an evening with him at his room on Lexington 
Avenue, to driak the delicious coffee he brewed in his 
percolator given him by William Marion Reedy, to 
mull with him over the remarkable scrap-books he 
had compiled out of the richness of his varied read- 
ing, and to hear him talk about books and life. 

SUas Orrin Howes was born in Macon, Georgia, 
October 15, 1867. He attended school ia Macon 
and Atlanta, and then in Franklin, Indiana. He 
never went to college. 

When he was bom, a passion for books was born 
with him. His niece tells me that by the time he 
was twenty-one he had collected a considerable 
library. He began life as a newspaper man, on the 
Macon Telegraph. About the age of twenty-four he 
went to Galveston where he was first a copy-reader, 
and then for seven years telegraph editor of the 
Galveston News. 

I do not know all the details of his life in Galves- 
ton, where he lived for about twenty years. He told 
me that at the time of the disastrous storm and 
flood he was working in a drug store near the Gulf 
front. He gave me a thrilling description of the 
night he spent standing on the prescription counter 
with the water swirling about his waist. He slept 
[92] 



Silas Orrin Howes 

in a little room at the back of the store, where he had 
a shelf of books which were particularly dear to him. 
Among them was a volume of Henley's poems. When 
the flood subsided all the books were gone, but the 
next day as he was looking over the wreckage of 
neighbouring houses he found his Henley washed 
up on a doorstep — covered with slime and filth but 
still intact. He sent it to Brentano's in New York 
to be reboxmd in veUum, instructing them not to 
clean it in any way. He wrote to Henley about the 
incident, who sent him a very friendly autographed 
card which he pasted in the volume. That was one 
of the books which he held most dear, and rightly. 

I do not know just when he came to New York; 
about 1910, I believe. He took a position as sales- 
man at Brentano's. After a couple of years there he 
became anxious to try the book business on his own 
account. He and his nephew opened a shop in San 
Antonio. Neither of them had much real business 
experience. Certainly Howes himself was far too de- 
voted a book-lover to be a good business man ! After 
a few months the venture ended in failure, and all 
the personal library which he had collected through 
patient years was swallowed up in the disaster. 
After this he returned to Brentano's, where he re- 
mained until his death. About a year before his 
death he was run over by a taxicab, which shook his 
nerves a great deal. 

At some time during his career he came into 

[93] 



Pipefuls 

intimate friendly contact with Ambrose Bierce, and 
used to tell many entertaining anecdotes about that 
erratic venturer in letters. He edited one of 
Bierce's volumes, adding a pleasant and scholarly 
little introduction. He was an occasional contributor 
to Reedy' s Mirror, where he enjoyed indulging in his 
original vein of satire and shrewd comment. He 
was a great lover of quaint and exotic restaurants, 
and was particularly fond of the Turkish cafe, the 
Constantinople, just ofF Madison Square. It was a 
treat to go there with him, see him summon the 
waiter by clapping his hands (in the eastern fashion), 
and enjoy the strangely compounded dishes of that 
queer menu. He had sampled every Bulgar, 
Turkish, Balkan, French, and Scandinavian restau- 
rant on Lexington Avenue. His taste in unusual and 
savoury dishes was as characteristic as his love for 
the finer flavours of literature. I remember last 
November I elicited from him that he had never 
tasted gooseberry jam, and had a jolly time hunting 
for a jar, which I found at last at Park and Tilford's, 
although the sales-girl protested there was no such 
thing. I took it to him and made him promise to 
eat it at his breakfasts. 

He had the true passions of the book-lover, which 
are not allotted to many. He had read hungrUy, 
enjoying chiefly those magical draughts of prose 
which linger in the mind: Bacon, Sir Thomas 
Browne, Pater, Thoreau, Conrad. He was much of 
[94] 



Silas Orrin Howes 

a recluse, a little saddened and sharpened perhaps 
by some of his experiences; and he loved, above all, 
those writers who can present truth with a faint tang 
of acid flavour, the gooseberry jam of literature as it 
were. One of my last satisfactions was to convert 
him (ra some measure) to an enthusiasm for Pearsall 
Smith's "Trivia." 

As one looks back at that quiet, honourable life, 
one is aware of a high, noble spirit shiniug through 
it: a spirit that sought but little for itself, welcomed 
love and comradeship that came its way, and was 
content with a modest round of routine duty because 
it afforded inner contact with what was beautiful and 
true. One remembers an ianate gentleness, and a 
loyalty to a high and chivalrous ideal. 

Such a life might be a lesson, if anything could, to 
the bumptious and "efficient" and smug. Time 
after time I have watched him serving some furred 
and jewelled customer who was not fit to exchange 
words with him; I have seen him jostled in a crowded 
aisle by some parvenu ignoramus who knew not 
that this quiet little man was one of the immortal 
spirits of gentleness and breeding who associate in 
quiet hours with the unburied dead of English 
letters. That corner of the store, near the front 
door, can never be the same. 

Such a life could only fittingly be described by 
the gentle, inseeing pen of an E. V. Lucas. 

My greatest regret and disappointment, when I 

[95] 



Pipefuls 

heard of his sudden death, was that he would never 
know of a httle tribute I had paid him in a forth- 
coming book. I had been saving it as a surprise for 
him, for I knew it would please him. And now he 
will never know. 
February. 1918. 



96 



JOYCE KILMER 



I 



WONDER, if there is any other country where the 
death of a young poet is double-column front- 



page newsr 

And if poets were able to proofread their own 
obits, I wonder if any two lines would have given 
Joyce Kilmer more honest pride than these: 

JOYCE KILMER, POET, 
IS KILLED IN ACTION 

which gave many hearts a pang when they picked 
up the newspaper last Sunday morning. 

Joyce Kilmer died as he lived — "in action." He 
found life intensely amusing, unspeakably interest- 
ing; his energy was unlimited, his courage stout. He 
attacked life at all points, rapidly gathered its 
complexities about him, and the more intricate it 

[97] 



Pipefuls 

became the more zestful he found it. Nothing 
bewildered him, nothing terrified. By the time he 
was thirty he had attained an almost unique position 
in literary circles. He lectured on poetry, he inter- 
viewed famous men of letters, he was poet, editor, 
essayist, critic, anthologist. He was endlessly 
active, full of delightful mirth and a thousand 
schemes for outwitting the devil of necessity that 
himts aU brainworkers. Nothing could quench him. 
He was ready to turn out a poem, an essay, a critical 
article, a lecture, at a few minutes' notice. He had 
been along all the pavements of Grub Street, perhaps 
the most exciting place of breadwinning known to the 
civilized man. From his begioning as a sales clerk 
in a New York bookstore (where, so the tale goes, by 
misreading the price cipher he sold a $150 volume for 
$1.50) down to the time when he was run over by an 
Erie train and dictated his weekly article for the 
New York Times in hospital with three broken ribs, 
no difficulties or perplexities daunted him. 

But beneath this whirling activity which amused 
and amazed his friends there lay a deeper and quieter 
vein which was rich in its own passion. It is not 
becoming to prate of what lies in other men's souls; 
we all have om* secrecies and sanctuaries, rarely 
acknowledged even to ourselves. But no one can 
read Joyce Kilmer's poems without grasping his 
vigorous idealism, his keen sense of beauty, his 
devout and simple religion, his clutch on the 
[98] 



Joyce Kilmer 

preciousness of common things. He loved the 
precarious bustle on Grub Street; he was of that ad- 
venturous, buoyant stuff that rejects hum-drum 
security and a pelfed and padded life. He always 
insisted that America is the very shrine and fountain 
of poetry, and this coimtry (which is indeed pathetic- 
ally eager to take poets to its bosom) stirred his 
vivid imagination. The romance of the com- 
muter's train and the suburban street, of the delica- 
tessen shop and the circus and the snowman in the 
yard — these were the familiar themes where he was 
rich and felicitous. Many a commuter will re- 
member his beautiful poem "The 12:45," bespeaking 
the thrill we have all felt in the shabby midnight 
train that takes us home, yearning and weary, to 
the well-beloved hearth: 

What love commands, the train fulfills 

And beautiful upon the hills 

Are these our feet of burnished steel. 

Subtly and certainly, I feel 

That Glen Rock welcomes us to her. 

And silent Ridgewood seems to stir 

And smile, because she knows the train 

Has brought her children back again. 

We carry people home — and so 

God speeds us, wheresoe'er we go. 

The midnight train is slow and old. 

But of it let this thing be told. 

To its high honour be it said. 

It carries weary folk to bed. 

[99] 



Pipefuls 

To a man such as this, whose whole fervent and 
busy adventiu"e was Ut within by the lampUght and 
firelight of domestic passion, the war, with its 
broken homes and defiled sanctities, came as a 
personal affront. Both to his craving for the 
glamour of such a colossal drama, and to his sense 
of what was most worshipful in human life, the call 
was irresistible. Counsels of prudence and comfort 
were as nothing; the heart-shaking poetry of this 
nation's entry into an utterly unselfish war burned 
away all barriers. His life had been a fury of 
writing, but those who thought he had entered the 
war merely to make journalism about it were mis- 
taken. Only a few weeks before his death he wrote: 

To tell the truth, I am not interested in writing 
nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression 
of something beautiful. And I see daily and nightly 
the expression of beauty in action instead of words, 
and I find it more satisfactory. I am a sergeant in 
the regimental intelligence section — the most fasci- 
nating work possible — more thrills in it than in any 
other branch, except, possibly, aviation. Wonder- 
ful life! But I don't know what I'll be able to do 
in civilian life — unless I become a fireman! 

As journalist and lecturer Ealmer was copious and 
enthusiastic rather than deep. He foimd — a good 
deal to his own secret mirth — women's clubs and 
poetry societies sitting earnestly at his feet, ex- 
pectant to hear ultimate truth on deep matters. 
[100] 



Joyce Kilmer 

His humour prompted him to give them the ultimate 
truth they craved. If his critical judgments were 
not always heavily documented or long jxindered, 
they were entertaining and pleasantly put. The 
earnest world of literary societies and blue-hosed 
salons lay about his feet; he flashed in it merrily, 
chuckling inwardly as he found hundreds of worthy 
people hanging breathless on his words. A kind of 
Kilmer cult grew apace; he had his followers and his 
devotees. I mention these things because he would 
have been the first to chuckle over them. I do not 
think he would want to be remembered as having 
taken all that sort of thing too seriously. It was all 
a delicious game — ^part of the grand joke of living. 
Sometimes, among his friends, he would begin to 
pontificate in his platform manner. Then he would 
recall himself, and his characteristic grin would flood 
his face. 

As a journaUst, I say, he was copious; but as a 
poet his song was always prompted by a genuine 
gush of emotion. "A poet is only a glorified reporter," 
he used to say; he took as his favourite assignment 
the happier precincts of the human heart. As he said 
of Belloc, a true poet will never write to order — ^not 
even to his own order. He sang because he heard 
life singing all about him. His three little books of 
poems have always been dear to lovers of honest 
simplicity. And now their words will be lit hence- 
forward by an inner and tender brightness — the 

[101] 



Pipefuls 

memory of a gallant boy who flung himself finely 
against the waUs of life. Where they breached he 
broke through aijd waved his sword laughing. 
"Where they hurled him back he tinned away, 
laughing still. 

II 

Kilmer wrote from France, in answer to an inquiry 
as to his ideas about poetry, " AU that poetry can be 
expected to do is to give pleasure of a noble sort to its 
readers." He might have said "pleasure or pain of 
a noble sort." 

It is both pleasure and pain, of a very noble sort, 
that the reader will find ia Robert Cortes HoUiday's 
memoir, which introduces the two volumes of 
Ealmer's poems, essays, and letters. The ultimate 
and eloquent tribute to Kilmer's rich, brave, and 
jocund personality is that it has raised up so moving 
a testament of friendship. Mr. HoUiday's lively and 
tender essay is worthy to stand among the great 
memorials of brotherly affection that have enriched 
our speech. To say that Kilmer was not a Keats is 
not to say that the friendship that irradiates Mr. 
HoUiday's memoir was less lovely than that of 
Keats and Severn, for instance. The beauty of any 
human intercourse is not measured by the plane on 
which it moves. 

Pleasure and pain of a noble sort are woven in 
every fibre of this sparkling castiag-up of the blithe 
[102] 



Joyce Kilmer 

years. Pleasure indeed of the fullest, for the 
chronicle abounds in the surcharged hilarity and 
affectionate humour that we have grown to expect 
in any matters connected with Joyce Kilmer. The 
biographer dwells with loving and smiling particu- 
larity on the elvish phases of the young knight-errant. 
It is by the very likeness of his tender and glowing 
portrait that we find pleasure overflowing Lato pain — 
into a wincing recognition of destiny's imriddled 
ways with men. This memory was written out of a 
full heart, with the poignance that lies in every back- 
ward human gaze. It is only in the backward look 
that the landscape's contours lie revealed in their 
true form and perspective. It is only when we have 
lost what was most dear that we know fully what it 
meant. That is Fate's way with us: it cannot be 
amended. 

There will be no need for the most querulous 
appraiser to find fault with Mr. HoUiday on the 
score of over-eulogy. He does not try to push 
sound carpentry or ready wit into genius. Fortune 
and his own impetuous onslaught iipon life cast 
Kilmer into the role of hack journalist: he would 
have claimed no other title. Yet he adorned Grub 
Street (that most fascinating of all thorny ways) with 
gestures and music of his own. Out of his glowing 
and busy brain he drew matter that was never dull, 
never bitter or petty or slovenly. In the fervent 
attack and counter-attack, shock and counter-shock 

[ 103 ] 



Pipefuls 

of his strenuous days he never forgot his secret 
loyalty to fine craftsmanship. He kept half a dozen 
brightly coloured balls spinning in air at all times — 
verses, essays, reviews, lectures, introductions, inter- 
views, anthologies, and what-not; yet each of these 
was deftly done. When he went to France and his 
days of hack work were over, when the necessities of 
life no longer threatened him, the journalistic habit 
fell away. It was never more than a garment, worn 
gracefully, but still only what the tailors call a busi- 
ness suit. 

In France, Kilmer wrote but a handful of pieces in- 
tended for publication, but at least one of them — ^the 
prose sketch "Holy Ireland" — showed his essential 
fibre. The comparative sUence of his pen when he 
found himself face to face with war was a true ex- 
pression. It bespoke the decent idealism that un- 
derlay the combats of a journalist wringing a living 
out of the tissues of a busy brain. The tender humour 
and quaint austerity of his homeward letters exhibit 
the man at his inmost. What could better the 
imaginative genius of the phrase in which he speaks 
of friendship developed by common dangers and 
hardships as "a fine, hearty, roaring, mirthful sort of 
thing, like an open fire of whole pine trees in a giant's 
castle.''" 

The memoir and Kilmer's own letters admit us to 
see something of the spiritual phases of this man's 
life, whose soul found "happiness and quiet kind" in 
[104] 



Joyce Kilmer 

the Roman Catholic faith. The most secret 
strengths and weaknesses that govern men's Uves are 
strangely imknown to many of their intimates: one 
wonders how many of Kilmer's associates on the 
Times staff knew of his habit of stopping daily at the 
Church of the Holy Innocents, near the newspaper 
office, to pray. It was the sorrow of personal 
affliction that brought Kilmer to the Catholic 
Church. Shortly after being received into that 
communion he wrote: 

Just off Broadway on the way from the Hudson 
Tube Station to the Times Building, there is a 
church called the Chiu-ch of the Holy Innocents. 
Since it is in the heart of the Tenderloin, this name is 
strangely appropriate — ^for there surely is need of 
youth and innocence. Well, every morning for 
months I stopped on my way to the office and 
prayed in this church for faith. When faith did 
come, it came, I think, by way of my little paralyzed 
daughter. Her lifeless hands led me; I think her 
tiny feet stiQ know beautiful paths. 

Mr. HolUday does well to point out that Kilmer 
was almost unique in this country as a representative 
of the Bellocian School of Catholic journalism, in 
which piety and mirth dwell so comfortably together; 
though he might have mentioned T. A. Daly as an 
older and subtler master of devout merriment, dip- 
ping in his own inkwell rather than in any imported 
bottles. It is to Belloc, of course, and to Gilbert 

• [ 105 ] 



Pipefuls 

Chesterton, that one must go to learn the secret of 
Kilmer's literary manner. Yet, as Holliday affirms, 
the similarity is due as much to an affinity of mind 
with these Englishmen as to any eagerness to imitate. 
Kilmer was like them in being essentially a 
humorist. One glance at his face, with its glowing 
red-brown eyes (the colour of port wine), and the 
twitching in-drawn corners of the mouth, gave the 
observer an impression of benignant drollery. Mr. 
Holliday well says: "People have made very 
creditable reputations as humorists who never 
wrote anything like as humorous essays as those of 
Joyce Kilmer. They fairly reek with the joy of 
life." 

"He that lives by the pen shall perish by the pen," 
the biographer tells us, quoting James Huneker. 
"For a sapling poet, within a few short years and by 
the hard business of words, to attain to a secretary 
and a butler and a family of, at length, four children, 
is a modern Arabian Nights Tale." Aye, indeed! 
But Joyce KUmer will have as genuine a claim on 
remembrance by reason of his friends' love as in 
anything his own hand penned. And what an en- 
circling, almost paternal, gentleness there is in the 
picture of the young poet as a salesman at Scribner's 
bookstore: 

His" smile, never far away, when it came was 
winning, charming. It broke like spring sunshine, 
it was so fresh and warm and clear. And there was 

[106] 



Joyce Kilmer 

noticeable then in his eyes a light, a quiet glow, 
which marked him as a spirit not to be forgotten. 
So tenderly boyish was he in effect that his confreres 
among the book clerks accepted with difficulty the 
story that he was married. When it was told that he 
had a son they gasped their incredulity. And when 
one day this extraordinary elfin sprite remarked that 
at the time of his honeymoon he had had a beard 
they felt (I remember) that the world was without 
power to astonish them further. 

And even more striking is what is implied in the 
narrative: that when this "elfin sprite," this gently 
nurtureid yoting man of bookish pursuits, took up the 
art of war, he gloried in his association with a rip- 
roaring regiment recruited mainly from hard-handed 
fellows of the type we may call (with no atom of 
disrespect) roughnecks. Hardships and exertions 
familiar to them were new to him, but he set himself 
to win their love and respect, and did so. He was 
not content imtil he had found his way into the most 
exhausting and hazardous branch of the whole job. 
He said, again and again, that he would rather be a 
sergeant with the 69th than a lieutenant with any 
other outfit. There was a heart of heroism in the 
"elfin sprite." The same dashing insouciance that 
dictated the weekly article for his paper when in 
hospital with three broken ribs after being run down 
by a train was hardened and steeled in the sergeant 
who nightly tore his uniform into ribbons by crawling 
out through the barbed wire. 

[107] 



Pipefuls 

Laughter and comradeship and hearty meals 
clustered about Kilmer: wherever he touched the 
grindstone of life there flew up a merry shower of 
sparks. There is convincing testimony to the 
courage and beauty that lay quiet at the heart of 
this singer who said that the poet is only a glorified 
reporter, and wished he had written "Casey at the 
Bat." 

Let us spare his memory the glib and customary 
dishonesty that says "He died as he would have 
wished to." No man wishes to die — at least, no 
poet does. To part with the exhilarating bustle and 
tumult, the blueness of the sky, the sunlight that 
tingles on well-known street corners, the plumber's 
bills and the editor's checks, the mirths of fellowship 
and the joys of homecoming when lamps are lit — 
all this is too close a fibre to be stripped easily from 
the naked heart. But the poet must go where the 
greatest songs are singing. Perhaps he finds, after 
all, that life and death are part of the same rhyme. 



[108] 



TALES OF TWO CITIES 

I. PHILADEIiPHIA 



AN EARLY TRAIN 




THE course of events has compelled me for 
several months to catch an early train at Broad 
Street three times a week. I call it an "early" 
train, but, of course, these matters are merely 
relative; 7:45 are the figures illuminated over the 
gateway — ^not so very precocious, perhaps; but quite 
rathe enough for one of Haroun-al-Raschid temper, 
who seldom seeks the "oblivion of repose" (Boswell's 
phrase) before 1 A. m. 

Nothing is more pathetic in human nature than its 
faculty of self-deception. Winding up the alarm 
clock (the night before) I meditate as to the exact 
time to elect for its disturbing buzz. If I set it at 

[111] 



Pipefuls 

6:30 that will give me plenty of time to shave and 
reach the station with leisure for a pleasurable cup of 
coflFee. But (so fraU is the human will) when I wake 
at 6:30 I will think to myself, "There is plenty of 
time," and probably turn over for "another five 
minutes." This will mean a hideous spasm of 
awakening conscience about 7:10 — an unbathed and 
unshaven tumult of preparation, malisons on the 
shoe manufacturers who invented boots with eyelets 
all the way up, a frantic sprint to Sixteenth Street 
and one of those horrid intervals that shake the very 
citadel of human reason when I ponder whether it is 
safer to wait for a possible car or must start hotfoot 
for the station at once. All this is generally decided 
by setting the clock for 6 :50. Then, if I am spry, I 
can be under way by 7:20 and have a little time to 
be philosophical at the corner of Sixteenth and Pine. 
Of the vile seizures of passion that shake the bosom 
when a car comes along, seems about to halt, and 
then passes without stopping — of the spiritual scars 
these crises leave on the soul of the victim, I cannot 
trust myself to speak. It does not always happen, 
thank goodness. One does not always have to throb 
madly up Sixteenth, with head retorted over one's 
shoulder to see if a car may still be coming, while the 
legs make what speed they may on sliddery paving. 
Sometimes the car does actually appear and one 
buffets aboard and is buried in a brawny human 
mass. There is a stop, and one wonders fiercely 
[112] 



An Early Train 

whether a horse is down ahead, and one had better 
get out at once and run for it. Tightly wedged 
in the heart of the car, nothing can be seen. It is all 
very nerve-racking, and I study, for quietness of 
mind, the familiar advertising card of the white- 
bearded old man announcing "It is really very 
remarkable that a cigar of this quality can be had for 
seven cents." 

Suppose, however, that fortune is with me. I 
descend at Market Street, and the City HaU dial, 
shining softly in the fast paling blue of morning, 
marks 7:30. Now I begin to enjoy myself. I 
reflect on the curious way in which time seems to 
stand still during the last minutes before the de- 
parture of a train. The half-hour between 7 and 
7:30 has vanished in a gruesome flash. Now follow 
fifteen minutes of exquisite dalliance. Every few 
moments I look suddenly and savagely at the clock 
to see if it can be playing some saturnine trick. No, 
even now it is only 7:32. In the lively alertness of 
the morning mind a whole wealth of thought and 
accurate observation can be crammed into a few 
seconds. I halt for a moment at the window of that 
little lunchroom on Market Street (between Six- 
teenth and Fifteenth) where the food comes swiftly 
speeding from the kitchen on a moving belt. I 
wonder whether to have breakfast there. It is such 
fim to see a platter of pale yellow scrambled eggs 
sliding demurely beside the porcelain counter and 

[113] 



Pipefuls 

whipped dextrously oflF in front of you by the 
presidiQg waiter. But the superlative coffee of the 
Broad Street Station lunch counter generally lures 
me on. 

What mundane joy can surpass the pleasure of 
approaching the station limch counter, with full ten 
minutes to satisfy a morning appetite! "Morning, 
colonel," says the waiter, recognizing a steady 
customer. "Wheatcakes and coffee," you cry. 
With one deft gesture, it seems, he has handed you a 
glass brimming with ice water and spread out a 
snowy napkin. In another moment here is the 
coffee, with the generous jug of cream. You splash 
in a large lump of ice to make it cool enough to 
drink. Perhaps the seat next you is empty, and you 
put your books and papers on it, thus not having to 
balance them gingerly on your knees. AU round 
you is a lusty savour of satisfaction, the tinkle of 
cash registers, napkins fluttering and flashing across 
the counters, coloured waiters darting to and fro, 
great clouds of steam rising where the big dish covers 
are raised on the cooking tables. You see the dark- 
brown coffee gently quivering in the glass gauge of 
the nickel boUer. Then here come the wheatcakes. 
Nowhere else on earth, I firmly believe, are they 
cooked to just that correct delicacy of golden brown 
colour; nowhere else are they so soft and light of 
texture, so hot, so beautifully overlaid with a smooth, 
almost intangible suggestion of crispness. Two 

[ 114 ] 



An Early Train 

golden butter pats salute the eye, and a jug of syrup. 
It is now 7:38. 

As everyone knows, the correct thing is to start 
immediately on the first cake, using only syrup. The 
method of dealing with the other two is classic. One 
lifts the upper one and places a whole pat of butter 
on the lower cake. Then one replaces the upper 
cake upon the lower, leaving the butter to its fate. 
In that hot and enviable embrace the butter liquefies 
and spreads itself, gently anointing the field of 
coming action. Upon the upper shield one smilingly 
distributes the second butter pat, knifed off into 
small shces for greater speed of melting. By the 
time the first cake has been eaten, with the syrup, 
the other two will be ready for manifest destiny. 
The butter will be docile and submissive. Now, 
after again making sure of the time (7:40) the syrup 
is brought into play and the palate has the congenial 
task of determining whether the added delight of 
melting butter outweighs the greater hotness and 
primal thrill of the first cake which was glossed with 
the syrup only. You drain your coffee to the dregs; 
gaze pityingly on those rushing in to snap up a 
breakfast before the 8 o'clock leaves for New York, 
pay your check, and saunter out to the train. It is 
7:43. 

This, to be sure, is only the curtain-raiser to the 
pleasures to follow. This has been a physical ^nd 
carnal pleasure. Now follow delights of the mind. 

[115] 



Pipefuls 

In the great gloomy shed wafts and twists of thick 
steam are jetting upward, heavily coiled in the cold 
air. In the train you smoke two pipes and read the 
morning paper. Then you are set down at Haver- 
ford. It is like a fairyland of unbelief. Trees and 
shrubbery are crusted and sheathed in crystal, lucid 
like chandeliers in the flat, thin light. Along the 
fence, as you go up the hill, you marvel at the 
scarlet berries in the hedge, gleaming through the 
glassy ribs of the bushes. The old willow tree by the 
Conklin gate is etched against the sky like a Japanese 
drawing — it has a curious greenish colour beneath 
that gray sky. There is some mystery in aU this. 
It seems more beautiful than a merely mortal earth 
vexed by sinful men has any right to be. There is 
some ice palace in Hans Andersen which is some- 
thing like it. In a little grove, the boughs, bent 
down with their shining glaziery, creak softly as they 
sway in the moving air. The evergreens are clotted 
with lumps and bags of transparent icing, their 
fronds sag to the ground. A pale twinkling blueness 
sifts over distant vistas. The sky whitens in the 
south and points of light leap up to the eye as the 
wind turns a loaded branch. 

A certain seriousness of demeanoiu* is notice- 
able on the generally unfurrowed brows of stu- 
dent friends. Midyears are on and one sees them 
walking, freighted with precious and perishable 
erudition, toward the halls of trial. They seem a 

[116] 



An Early Train 

little oppressed with care, too preoccupied to relish 
the entrancing pallor of this crystallized Eden. 
One carries, gravely, a cushion and an alarm clock. 
Not such a bad theory of life, perhaps — to carry in 
the crises of existence a cushion of philosophy and an 
alarum of resolution. 



117] 



EIDGE AVENUE 

ONE of the odd things about human beings is, 
that wherever they happen to Hve they accept 
it as a matter of course. In various foreign cities I 
have often been amused (as every traveller has) to see 
people going about their affairs just as though it were 
natural and unquestionable for- them to be there. 
It is just the same at home. Everyone I see on the 
streets seems to be not at all amazed at living here 
instead of (let us say) Indianapolis or Nashville. I 
envy my small Urchin his sense of the extreme 
improbability of everything. When he gets on a 
trolley car he draws a long breath and looks around 
in ecstasy at the human scenery. I am teaching 
him to say in a loud, clear tone, as he gets on the car, 
"Look at all the human beings!" in the same accent 
of amazement that he uses when he goes to the Zoo. 
Perhaps in this way he will preserve the happy 
faculty of being surprised. 

It is an agreeable thing to keep the same sense of 
surprise in one's home town that one would have in 
a strange city. You will find much to startle you if 
you keep your eyes open. Yesterday, for instance, I 
was lucky enough to meet a gentleman who had 
stood only a few feet away from Lincoln when he 
[118] 



Ridge Avenue 

made the Gettysburg Speech. Then I found that in 
a certain cafeteria which I frequent the price you 
pay for your lunch is always just one cent less than 
that pimched on the check. The cashier explained 
that this always gives a pleasant surprise to the 
customers, and has proved such a good advertising 
dodge that the proprietor made it a habit. And I 
saw, in a clothing dealer's window on Ninth Street, 
some fuzzy caps for men, mottled pm-ple and ochre, 
that proved that the adventurous spirit has not 
died in the breast of the male sex. 

There is much to exercise the eye in a voyage along 
Ridge Avenue. Approaching by way of Ninth 
Street, one sees in the window of a barber shop the 
new contract that the employing barbers have 
drawn up with their jom-neymen. This agreement 
shows a sound sense of human equities, proclaiming 
as it does that "the owner must not do no act to 
en jure the barber personal earnings." It suddenly 
occurred to me, what I had not thought of before, 
how the barbers of Great Britain must have grieved 
when a London newspaper got up (some years ago) 
an agitation in favour of every man in England 
raising a beard in memory of King Edward. The 
plan was that the money thus saved was to be de- 
voted to building — I had almost said "growing" — a 
battleship, to be named after the Merry Monarch. 
Of course, one should not speak of raising a beard, 
but of lowering it. However 

[119] 



Pipefuls 

Ridge Avenue begins at Ninth and Vine, in a 
mood of depression. Perhaps the fact that it runs 
out toward the city's greatest collection of cemeteries 
has made it morbidly conscious of human perish- 
ability. At any rate, it starts among pawnshops, 
old clothing and furniture, and bottles of Old Vir- 
ginia Bitters, the Great Man Restorer. The 
famous National Theatre at Callowhill Street has 
become a garage: it is queer to see the old 
proscenium arch and gilded ceiling dustily vaulted 
over a fleet of motortrucks. After a wilderness of 
railway yards one comes to a curious bit in the 1100 
block; a httle brick tunnel that bends around into a 
huddle of backyards and small houses, where a 
large green parrot was stooping and nodding on a 
pile of old boxes. This little scene is overlooked by 
the tall brown spires of the Church of the Assump- 
tion on Spring Garden Street. 

There is matter for tarrying at the Spring Garden 
Street crossing. Here is an ambitious fountain buUt 
by the bequest of Mary Rebecca Darby Smith, with 
the carving by J. J. Boyle picturing another Rebecca 
(she of Genesis xxiv, 14) giving a drink to Abra- 
ham's servant and his camels. It is carved in the 
bronze that the donor gave the foxmtain "To refresh 
the weary and thirsty, both man and beast," so it is 
disconcerting to find it dry, as dry as the inns along 
the way. The horse trough is boarded over and 
thirsting equines go up to Broad Street for a draught. 
[120] 



Ridge Avenue 

The seat by the fountain was occupied by a man read- 
ing the New York Journal, always a depressing 
sight. 

Across from the fountain is one of the best maga- 
zine and stationery shops in the city. Here I over- 
heard a conversation which I reproduce textually. 
"What you doing, reading?" said one to another. 
"Yes, reading about the biggest four-flusher in the 
Yew-nited States," said he, looking over an after- 
noon paper which had just come in. "Who do you 
mean.'' " "Penrose. Say if it was a Republican in the 
White House, theyda passed the treaty long ago." 
The proprietor of this shop is a humorist. Some- 
one came in asking for a certain brand of cigarettes. 
He does not sell tobacco. "Next door," he said, and 
added : " And you'll find some over on the fountain." 

Ridge Avenue specializes in tobacco shops, where 
you will find many brands that require a strong head. 
Red Snapper, Panhandle Scrap, Pinch Hit, Red 
Horse, Brown's Mule, Jolly Tar, Penn Statue Cut- 
tings, Nickel Cross Cut, Cotton Ball Twist. In 
the shop windows you wiU see those photographs 
illustrating current events, the two favourites just 
now being a picture of Mike GUhooley, the famous 
stowaway, gazing plaintively at the profile of New 
York, and "Jack Dempsey Goes the Limit," where 
Jack signs up for a $1,000 war-savings certificate. 
One wonders if Jack's kind of warfare is really so 
profitable after all. 

[ 121 ] 



Pipefuls 

There are a number of little side excursions from 
the avenue that repay scrutiny. Lemon Street, for 
instance, where in a lane of old brown wooden houses 
some children were playing in an empty wagon, with 
the roimded tower of the Rodef Shalom synagogue 
looming in the background. Best of all is Melon 
Street and its modest tributary. Park Avenue — 
stretches of quiet little brick homes with green and 
yellow shutters and mottled gray marble steps. 
These little houses have the serene and sunny air so 
typical of Philadelphia byways. Through their 
narrow side entrances one sees glimpses of green in 
backyards. In the front windows move the gently 
swaying faces of grandmothers, lulled in the to and 
fro of a rocking chair. There are shining brass 
knobs and beU-puUs; rubber plants on the sills, or 
perhaps a small bowl of goldfish with a white china 
swan floating. In one window was a sign 
"Vacancies." Over it hung a faded service flag 
with a golden star. Who could phrase the pathos of 
these two things, side by side.'^ 

At Broad Street, Ridge Avenue leaps up with a 
spurt of high life. In the window of a hotel diaiag 
room a gentleman sat eating his lunch, stevedoring a 
buttered roll with such gusto that one felt tempted to 
applaud. There are the white pillars of a bank and 
the battleship gray of the Salvation Army head- 
quarters. Beyond Broad, the avenue spruces up a 
bit and enters upon a vivacious phase. Dogs are 
[ 122 ] 



Ridge Avenue 

frequent: white bull terriers lie sunning in the 
shop windows. Offers to lend money are enticing. 
There is a fascinating slate yard at 1525, where 
great gray slabs lie in the sun, a temptation to ur- 
chias with a bit of chalk. In the warm bask of the 
afternoon there rises a pleasing aroma of fruits and 
vegetables piled up in baskets and crates on the 
pavement. Grapes give off a delectable savour in the 
golden air. Elderly ladies are out in force to do the 
marketing, and their eyes are bright with the bargain- 
ing passion. Round the windows of a ten-cent 
store, most fascinating of all human spectacles, they 
congregate and compare notes. A fruit dealer has 
an ingenious stunt to attract attention. On his cash 
register lies a weird-looking rotund little fish — a 
butter fish, he calls it — ^which has a face not xmlike 
that of Fatty Arbuckle. Either this fish inflates it- 
self or he has blown it full of air in some ingenious 
manner, for it presents a grotesque appearance, and 
many ladies stop to inquire. Then he spoofs them 
gently. "Sure," he says, "it's a jitney fish. It 
lives on the cash register. It can fly, it can bite, it 
can talk, and it likes money." 

At the corner of Wylie Street stands an old gray 
house with a mansard roof and gable windows. 
Against it is a vivid store of fruit glowing in the sun, 
red and purple and yellow. Here, or on Vineyard 
Street, one turns off to enter the quaint triangular 
settlement of Francisville. 

[123] 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE URCHIN 




SUNDAY afternoon is by old tradition dedi- 
cated to the taking of Urchins out to taste 
the air, and indeed there is no more agreeable 
pastime. And so, as the Urchin sat in his high 
chair and thoughtfully shovelled his spoon through 
meat chopped remarkably small and potatoes 
mashed in that curious fashion that produces a mass 
of soft, curly tendrils, his curators discussed the 
question of where he should be taken. 

It was the first Sunday in March — mild and soft 
and tinctured with spring. "There's the botanic 
garden at the University," I suggested. The 
[124] 



University and Urchin 

Urchin settled it by rattling his spoon on the plate 
and sliding several inches of potato into his lap. 
"Go see garden!" he cried. With the generous 
tastes of twenty-seven months he cares very little 
where he is taken; he can find fascination in any- 
thing; but something about the word "garden" 
seemed to allure him. So a little later when he had 
been duly habited in brown leggings, his minute 
brown overcoat, and white hat with ribbons behind 
it, he and his curators set out. The Urchin was in 
excellent spirits, for he had been promised a ride on a 
trolley car — ^a glorious adventure. In one pocket he 
carried his private collection of talismans, including 
a horse-chestnut and a picture of a mouse. Also, 
against emergencies, a miniature handkerchief with 
a teddy bear embroidered in one corner and a safety 
pin. The expedition may be deemed to have been a 
success, as none of these properties were called upon 
or even remembered. 

The car we boarded did not take us just where we 
expected to go, but that made little difference to the 
Urchin, who gazed steadfastly out of the window at 
a panorama of shabby streets, and offered no com- 
ment except one of extreme exultation when we 
passed a large poster of a cow. Admirably docile, he 
felt confident that the vmusual conjimction of both 
arbiters of destiny and an impressive trolley car 
woiJd in the end produce something extremely 
worth while. We sped across Gray's Ferry bridge — 

[ 125 ] 



Pipefuls 

it seems strange to think that region was once so 
quiet, green, and rustic — transferred to another car 
on Woodland Avenue, past the white medley of 
tombstones in Woodland Cemetery, and got off at 
the entrance to the dormitory quadrangles at Thirty- 
seventh Street. We entered through the archway — 
the Urchin's first introduction to an academic at- 
mosphere. "This is the University," I said to him 
severely, and he was much impressed. As is his 
way, he conducted himself with extreme sobriety 
until he should get the hang of this new experience and 
see what it was all about. I knew from the serene 
gold sparkle of his brown eyes that there was plenty 
of larking spirit in him, waiting until he knew 
whether it was safe to give it play. He held my 
hand punctiliously while waiting to see what manner 
of place this University was. 

A college quadrangle on a Sunday afternoon has a 
feeling all its own. Thin tioklings of mandolins 
eddy from open windows, in which yoimg men may 
be seen propped up against bright-coloured cushions, 
always smokiag, and sometimes reading with an 
apparent zeal which might deceive a few onlookers. 
But the slightest sound of footfalls on the pavement 
outside their rooms causes these heads to turn and 
scan the passers. There is always a vague hope in 
these youthful breasts that some damsel of notable 
fairness may have strayed within the bastions. 
Groups of ladies of youth and beauty do often walk 
[126] 



University and Urchin 

demurely tlirough the courts, and may be sure of 
hearing admiring whistles shrilled through the sunny 
air. When a lady walks through a college quad- 
rangle and hears no sibilation, let her know sadly 
that first youth is past. Even the sedate guardian- 
ship of Scribe and Urchin did not forfeit one Lady of 
Destiny her proper homage of timeful testimonial. 
So be it ever! 

One who inhabited coUege quadrangles not so 
immeasurably long ago, and remembers with secret 
pain how massively old, experienced, and worldly 
wise he then thought himself, can never resist a 
throb of amazement at the entertaining youthfulness 
of these young monks. How quaintly juvenile they 
are, and how oddly that assumption of grave 
superiority sits upon their golden brows! With 
what an inimitable air of wisdom, cynicism, 
ancientry, learned aloofness and desire to be ob- 
served do they stroll to and fro across the quads, so 
keenly aware in their inmost bosoms of the presence 
of visitors and determined to grant an appearance of 
mingled wisdom, great age, and sad doggishness! 
What a devil-may-care swing to the stride, what a 
nonchalance in the perpetual wreath of cigarette 
smoke, what a carefully assumed bearing of one 
carrying great wisdom lightly and easily casting it 
aside for the moment in the pursuit of some waggish 
trifle. "Here," those very self-conscious young 
visages seem to betray, "is one who might tell you 

[127] 



Pipefuls 

all about the Holy Roman Empire, and yet is, for the 
moment, diverting himself with a mere mandolin." 
And yet, as the Lady of Destiny shrewdly observed, 
it is a pity they should mar their beautiful quad- 
rangles with orange peel and scraps of paper. 

We walked for some time through those stately 
courts of Tudor brick and then passed down the 
little inclined path to the botanic garden, where 
irises and fresh green spikes are already pushing up 
through the damp earth. A pale mellow sunlight 
lay upon the gravel walks and the Urchin resumed 
his customary zeal. He ran here and there along the 
byways, examined the rock borders with an air of 
scientific questioning, and watched the other children 
playing by the muddy pond. We found shrubbery 
swelling with buds, also flappers walking hatless 
and blanched with talcum, accompanied by Urchins 
of a larger growth. Both these phenomena we tool^ 
to be a sign of the coming equinox. 

Returning to the dormitory quadrangles, we sat 
down on a wooden bench to rest, whUe the Urchin, 
now convinced that a xmiversity is nothing to be 
awed by, scampered about on the turf. His eye was 
a bright jewel of roguishness, for he thought that in 
trotting about the grass he was doing something 
supremely wicked. He has been carefully trained 
not to err on the grass of the city square to which he 
is best accustomed, so this surprising and unchecked 
revelry quite went to his head. Across and about 
[ 128 ] 



University and Urchin 

those wide plots of sodden turf he trotted and 
chuckled, a small, quaint mortal with his hat ribbons 
fluttering. Cheering whistles hailed him from open 
windows above, and he smiled to himself with grave 
dignity. Apparently, like a distinguished states- 
man, he regarded these tributes not as meant for 
himself, but for the great body of childhood he 
innocently represents, and indeed from which his 
applauders are not so inextricably severed. With 
the placid and unconscious happiness of a puppy he 
careered and meandered, without motive or method. 
Perhaps his imderlying thought of a university, if he 
has any, is that it is a place where no one says "Keep 
OflF the Grass," and, intellectually speaking, that 
woiild not be such a bad motto for an institution of 
learning. 

I don't know whether Doctor Tait McKenzie so 
intended it, but his appealing and beautiful statue of 
Young Franklin in front of the University 
gymnasiima is admirably devised for the delight of 
small Urchins. While their curators take pleasure 
in the bronze itseK, the Urchin may clamber on the 
different levels of the base, which is nicely adapted 
foi- the mountaineering capacity of twenty-seven 
months. The low brick walls before the gymnasium 
and the University museum are also just right for 
an Urchin who has recently learned the fascination 
of walking on something raised above the ground, 
provided there is a curator near by to hold his hand. 

[129] 



Pipefuls 

And then, as one walks away toward the South 
Street bridge an observant Urchin may spy the de- 
lightful spectacle of a freight train travelling ap- 
parently in midair. Some day, one hopes, all that 
fine tract of open space leading from the museum 
down to the raUroad tracks may perhaps be 
beautified as a park or an addition to the University's 
quadrangle system. I don't know who owns it, but 
its architectural possibilities must surely make the 
city-planner's mouth water. 

By this time the Urchin was beginning to feel a 
bit weary, and was glad of a lift on a parental 
shoulder. Then a Lombard Street car came along 
and took us up halfway across the bridge. So 
ended the Urchin's first introduction to a university 
education. 



[130] 



PINE STREET 

OUR neighbourhood is very genteel. I doubt if 
any one who has not hved in Philadelphia can 
imagiae how genteel it is. Visitors from out of 
town are wont to sigh with rapture when they see 
our trim blocks of tall brick dwellings — that even 
cornice running in a smooth line for several hundred 
yards really is quite a sight — and exclaim, "Oh, I 
wish we had something like this in New York!" 
But our gentility is a little self-conscious, for we live 
on the very frontier of a region, darker in complex- 
ion, which is far from scrupulous in deportment. 
Uproarious and naive are the humoiu-s of South 
Street, lying just behind us. Stanleys have gone 
exploring thither and come back with merry tales. 
South Street on a bright evening, its myriad barber 
shops gleaming with lathered dusky cheeks, wafting 
the essence of innumerable pomades and lotions, that 
were a Travel indeed. On South Street the veins of 
life run close to the surface. 

We are no less human on our street, but it takes a 
bit more study to get at the secret. There is a cer- 
tain reticence about us. It would take an earth- 
quake to cause much fraternization along Pine Street. 

[131] 



Pipefuls 

Perhaps it is because three houses out of every four 
bear the tablets of doctors. The average layman 
fears to stop and speak to his neighbour for fear it 
will develop into a professional matter. We board up 
our front windows at night with heavy wooden 
shutters. We have no druggists, only "apothe- 
caries." These apothecaries are closed on Sundays. 
They sell stamps in little isinglass capsules, to be 
quite sanitary, two twos in a capsule for five cents. 
In their shops you can still get soda water with 
"plain cream" and shaved ice, such as was cus- 
tomary twenty-five years ago. When our doctors 
go away for the summer, someone comes twice a 
week from Jvme to October to polish up the little 
silver name plate. It is the custom in our neighbour- 
hood (so one observes through drawing room win- 
dows) to have reading lamps with rosy pink shades 
and at least two beautiful daughters of debutante 
age. I hope I am not unjust, but our street looks to 
me like the kind of place where people take warm 
baths, in a roomy old china tub, on Simday after- 
noons. After that, they go downstairs and play a 
hymn on the piano, at twilight. 

There are a number of very odd features about our 
neighbourhood. There is a large school house at the 
next corner, but as far as I can see, it is not used as a 
school, not for children, at any rate. Sometimes, 
about 8 o'clock in the evening, I see the building 
gloriously illuminated, and a lonely lady stooped and 
[132] 



Pine Street 




assiduous at a table. She seems quite solitary. 
Perhaps her researches are so poignant that the 
school board has prescribed entire silence. But 
midway down the block is a very jolly little private 
school, to which very genteel children may be seen 
approaching early in the morning. The little girls 
come with a bustle of starch, on foot, accompanied 
by governesses; the small boys arrive in limousines. 
They are small boys dressed very much in the 
English manner, with heavy woollen stockings ending 
just below the knee. They probably do not realize 
that their tailor has carefully planned them to look 
like dear little English boys. Then there is a very 
mysterious small theatre near by. If it were a 
movie theatre, what a boon it would be ! But no, it 
is devoted to a strange cult called the Religion of 

[133] 



Pipefuls 

Business, which meets there on Sundays. Before 
that, there was a Korean congress there. There is a 
lovely green room in this theatre, but not much long 
green in the box office. Philadelphia prefers Al 
Jolson to Hank Ibsen. 

We have our tincture of vie de Boheme, though, in 
our little French table d'hote, a thoroughly at- 
mospheric place. Delightful Madame B., with her 
racy philosophy of life, what delicious soups and 
salads she serves ! Happy indeed are those who have 
learned the way to her little tables, and heard her 
cheerful cry "A la cuisine!" when one of her small 
dogs prowls into the dining room. Equally unique 
is the old curiosity shop near by, one of the few gen- 
uine "notion" shops left in the city (though there is 
a delightful one on Market Street near Seventeenth, 
to enter which is to step into a country village) . This 
is just the kind of shop bought by the old gentleman 
in one of Frank Stockton's agreeable tales, "Mr. 
Tolman,"inthevolumecalled"TheMagicEgg". The 
proprietress, charming and conversable lady, will sell 
you anything in the "notions" line, from a paper of 
pins to garter elastic. Then there is the laundry, 
whose patrons carry on a jovial game known as 
"Looking for Your Own." Every week, by some 
cheery habit of confusion, the lists are lost, and one 
himts through shelves of neatly piled and crisply 
laundered garments to pick out one's own collars, 
pyjamas, or whatever it may be. The amusing 
[134] 



Pine Street 

humours of this pastime must be experienced to be 
understood. 

The little cigar and magazine shop on the comer is 
the political and social focus of the neighbourhood. I 
shall never forget the pallid and ghastly coimtenance 
of the newsdealer when the rumoiu" first went the 
roimds that "Hampy" was elected. Every evening a 
little gathering of local sages meets in the shop; ou 
tilted chairs, in a haze of tobacco, they while the 
hours away. In tobacco the host adheres to the 
standard blends, but in literatm-e he is enterprising. 
Until recently this was the only place I know in 
Philadelphia where one could get the Illustrated 
London News every week. 

There are twinges of modernity going on along our 
street. Some of the old houses have been remodeled 
into apartments. There is an "electric shoe re- 
pairer" just roimd the corner. But the antique 
dealers and plumbers for which the street is famous 
still hold sway; the fine old brick pavement still col- 
lects rain water in its numerous dimpled hollows, 
and the yellowish marble horse-blocks adorn the curb. 
The nice shabby stables in the little side streets have 
not yet been tm-ned into studios by artists, and the 
neighbourhood's youngest urchins set sail for Ritten- 
house Square every morning on their fleet of "kiddie- 
cars." Their small stout legs, twinkling along the 
pavements in white gaiters on a wintry day, area 
pleasant sight. Even our urchins are notably gen- 

[135] 



Pipefuls 

teel. Surrounded on all sides by the medical profes- 
sion, they are reared on registered mUk and educator 
crackers. If Philadelphia ever betrays its soul, it 
does so on this delightful, bland, and genteel high- 
way. 



[136] 



PERSHING IN PHILADELPHIA 




THE pavement in front of Independence Hall 
was a gorgeous jumble of colours. The great 
silken flags of the Allies, carried by vividly costumed 
ladies, burned and flapped in the wind. On a 
pedestal stood the Goddess of Liberty, in rich white 
draperies that seemed fortunately of sufficient 
texture to afford sorae warmth, for the air was cool. 
She graciously turned round for Walter Crail, the 
photographer of our contemporary, the Evening 
Public Ledger, to take a shot at her. 

Down Chestnut Street came a rising tide of 
cheers. A squadron of mounted police galloped by. 
Then the First City Troop, with shining swords. 

[ 137 ] 



Pipefuls 

Fred Eckersburg, the State House engineer, was 
fidgeting excitedly inside the hall, in a new uniform. 
This was Fred's greatest day, but we saw that he was 
worried about Martha Washington, the Inde- 
pendence Hall cat. He was apprehensive lest the 
excitement should give her a fit or a palsy. Inde- 
pendence Hall is no longer the quiet old place 
Martha used to enjoy before the war. 

The Police Band struck up "Hail to the Chief." 
Yells and cheers burst upward from the ground like 
an explosion. Here he was, standing in the car. 
There was the famous chin, the Sam Browne belt, 
the high laced boots with spurs. Even the tan 
gloves carried in the left hand. There was the smile, 
without which no famous man is properly equipped 
for public life. There was Governor Sproul's 
placid smile, too, but the Mayor seemed too excited 
to smUe. Rattle, rattle, rattle went the shutters of 
the photographers. Up the scarlet lane of carpet 
came the general. His manner has a charming, easy 
grace. He saluted each one of the fair ladies garbed 
in costumes of our Allies, but taking care not to 
linger too long in front of any one of them lest any 
embracing should get started. A pattering of tiger 
lilies or some such things came dropping down from 
above. He passed into the hall, which was cool and 
smelt like a wedding with a musk of flowers. 

While the Big Chief was having a medal presented 
to him inside the hall we managed to scuttle round 
[138] 



Pershing in Philadelphia 

underneath the grand stand and take up a pencil of 
vantage just below the little pulpit where the general 
was to speak. Here the crowd groaned against a 
bulwark of stout policemen. Philadelphia cops, 
bless them, are the best tempered in the world. 
(How Boston must envy us.) Genially two gigantic 
bluecoats made room against the straining hawser for 
young John Fisher, aged eleven, of 332 Greenwich 
Street. John is a small, freckle-faced urchin. It 
was amusiag to see him thrusting his eager little 
beezer between the vast, soft, plushy flanks of two 
patrolmen. He had been there over two hours 
waiting for just this adventure. Then, to assert the 
equality of the sexes, Mildred Dubivitch, aged 
eleven, and Eva Ciplet, aged nine, managed to insert 
themselves between the chinks in the line of cops. 
An old lady more than eighty years old was sitting 
placidly ia a small chair just inside the ropes. She 
had been in the square more than five hours, and the 
police had found her a seat. "Are you going to put 
Pershing's name iu, too?" asked John as we noted 
his address. 

Independence Square never knew a more thrilling 
fifteen minutes. The trees were tossing and bending 
in the thrilluig blue air. There was a bronzy tint in 
their foliage, as though they were putting on olive 
drab in honour of the general. Great balloons of 
silver clouds scoured across the cobalt sky. At one 
minute to 11 Pershuig appeared at the top of the 

[139] 



Pipefuls 

stand. The whole square, massed with people, 
shook with cheers. 

Had it been any other man we would have said the 
general was frightened. He came down the aisle of 
the stand with his delightful, easy, smiling swing; but 
he looked shrewdly about, with a narrow-eyed, puck- 
ered gaze. He was plainly a little flabbergasted. 
He seemed taken aback by the greatness of Phil- 
adelphia's voice. He said something to himself. On 
his lips it looked like "What the deuce," or some- 
thing of similar purport. He sat down on a chair 
beside Governor Sproul. Not more than four feet 
away, amazed at our own audacity, we peered over 
the floor of the stand. 

He was paler than we expected. He looked a bit 
tired. Speaking as a father, we were pleased to note 
the absence of Warren, who was (we hope) getting a 
good sleep somewhere. We had a good look at the 
renowned chin, which is well worth study. It must 
be a hard chin to shave. It juts upward, reaching a 
line exactly below the brim of his cap. Below his 
crescent moustache there is no lower lip visible: it 
is tucked and folded in by the rising thrust of the 
jaw. It is this which gives him the "grim" aspect 
which every reader of the paf>ers hears about. 
He is grim, there's no doubt about it, with the grim- 
ness of a man going through a tough ordeal. "I can 
see him all right," squeaked little John Fisher, "but 
he doesn't see me." The first two rows of seats at 
[ 140 ] 



Pershing in Philadelphia 

the right of the aisle were crammed with generals, 
two-star and three-star. From our lowly station we 
could see a grand panorama of mahogany leather 
boots and the flaring curves of riding breeches. It 
was a great day for Sam Browne. The thought came 
to us that has reached us before. The higher you go 
in the A. E. F. the more the officers are tailored after 
the English manner. It is the finest proof of inter- 
national cousinship. When England and America 
wear the same kind of clothes, alliance is knit solid. 

Pershing sat with his palms on his knees. He 
looked worried. There was a wavering crease down 
his lean cheeks. The pliunply genial countenance 
of Governor Sproul next to him was an odd contrast 
to that dry, hard face. The bell in the tower tolled 
eleven times. He stood up for the photographers. 
Walter Crail, appearing from somewhere, sprang up 
on the parapet facing the general. " Look this way ! " 
he shouted as the general tm-ned toward some movie 
men. That will be Walter's first cry when he gets to 
heaven, or wherever. Mayor Smith's face was pallid 
with excitement. His nicely draped trouserings, 
which were only six inches from our notebook, quiv- 
ered slightly as he said fifteen words of introduction. 

As Pershing stood up to speak the crowd surged 
forward. The general was worried. "Don't, don't! 
Somebody will get hurt!" he called sharply. Then 
Mayor Smith surged forward also and said something 
to the police about watching the crowd. 

[ 141 1 



Pipefuls 

The general took ofif his cap. Holding it in his 
left hand (with the gloves) he patted his close- 
cropped hair nervously. He frowned. He began to 
speak. 

The speech has already been covered by our hated 
rivals. We will not repeat it, save to say that it was 
as crisp, clean-cut, and pointed as his chin. He was' 
nervous, as we could see by the clenching and un- 
clenching of his hands. His voice is rather high. 
We liked him for not being a suave and polished 
speaker. He gestured briskly with a pointing fore- 
finger, and pronounced the word patriotic with a 
short A — "pattriotic." Later he stumbled over it 
again and got it out as patterotism. We liked him 
again for that. He doesn't have to pronounce it, 
anyway. We liked him best of all for the un- 
conscious slip he made. "This reception," he said, 
"I imderstand is for the splendid soldiery of America 
that played such an important part in the war with 
our Allies." A respectful ripple of laughter passed 
over the stand at this, but he did not notice it. He 
was fighting too hard to think what to say next. 
We liked him, too, for saying "such an important 
part." A man who had been further away from the 
fighting would have said that it was America, alone 
and unaided, that won the war. He is just as we 
have hoped he would be: a plain, blunt man. We 
have heard that he is going to enter the banking 
business. We'd like to have an account at that bank. 
[142j 



FALL FEVER 




ABOUT this time of year, when the mellow air 
L swoons (as the poets say) with golden languor 
and the landscape is tinged a soft brown like a piece 
of toast, we feel the onset and soft impeachment of 
fall fever. 

Fall fever is (in our case at any rate) more in- 
sidious than the familiar disease of spring. Spring 
fever impels us to get out in the country; to seize a 
knotted cudgel and a pouchful of tobacco and 
agitate our limbs over the landscape. But the 
drowsiness of autumn is a lethargy in the true sense 
of that word — a forgetfulness. A forgetfulness of 
past discontents and future joys; a forgetfulness of 
toil that is gone and leisure to come; a mere breathing 
existence in which one stands vacantly eyeing the 
human scene, living in a gentle simmer of the faculties 
like a boiling kettle when the gas is turned low. 

Fall fever, one supposes, is our inheritance from 
the cave man, who (like the bear and the — well, some 

[143] 



Pipefuls 

other animal, whatever it is) went into hibernation 
about the first of November. Autumn with its soft 
inertia lulled him to sleep. He ate a hearty meal, 
raked together some dry leaves, curled up and slid off 
until the alarm clock of April. 

This agreeable disease does not last very long with 
the modern man. He fights bravely against it; then 
the frost comes along, or the coal bill, and stings him 
into activity. But for a few days its genial torpor 
may be seen (by the observant) even in our bustling 
modern career. When we read yesterday that 
Judge Audenried's court clerks had fallen asleep 
during ballot-counting proceedings we knew that the 
microbe was among us again. Keats, in his lovely 
Ode, describes the figure of Autumn as stretched out 
"on a half -reaped furrow sound asleep." Un- 
happily the conventions forbid city dwellers from 
curling up on the pavements for a cheerful nap. If 
one were brave enough to do so, imquestionably 
many would follow his example. But the urbanite 
has taught himself to doze upright. You may see 
many of us, standing dreamily before Chestnut 
Street show windows in the lunch hour, to all intents 
and purposes in a state of slumber. Yesterday, in 
that lucid shimmer of warmth and light, a group 
stood in front of a doughnut window near Ninth 
Street: not one of them was more than half awake. 
Similarly a gathering watched the three small birds 
who have become a traditional window ornament on 
[144] 



Fall Fever 

Chestnut Street (they have recently moved from an 
oculist to a corresj)ondence course office) and a faint 
whisper of snoring arose on the sultry air. The 
customs of city life permit a man to stand still as 
long as he likes if he will only pretend to be watching 
something. We saw a substantial burgher pivoted 
by the window of Mr. Albert, the violin maker, on 
Ninth Street. Apparently he was studying the fine 
autographed photo of Patti there displayed; but 
when we sidled near we saw that his eyes were close;d; 
this admirable person, who seemed to be what is 
known as a "busy executive," and whose desk un- 
doubtedly carries a plate-glass sheet with the orisons 
of Swett Marden under it, was in a blissful doze. 

Modern life (as we say) struggles against this 
sweet enchantment of autumn, but Nature is too 
strong for us. Why is it that all these strikes occur 
just at this time of year.? The old hibernating 
instinct again, perhaps. The workman has a sub- 
conscious yearning to scratch together a nice soft 
heap of manila envelopes and lie down on that 
couch for a six months' ear-poxmding. There are all 
sorts of excuses that one can make to one's self for 
waving farewell to toil. Only last Sunday we saw 
this ad in a paper: 

HEIRS WANTED. The war is over and has 
made many new heirs. You may be one of them. 
Investigate. Many now living in poverty are rich, 
but don't know it. 

[1451 



Pipefuls 

Now what could be simpler (we said to ourself as 
we stood contemplating those doughnuts) than to 
forsake our jolly old typewriter and spend a few 
months in "investigating" whether any one had 
made us his heir? It might be. Odd things have 
happened. Down in Washington Square, for in- 
stance (we thought), are a number of sim- warmed 
benches, very reposeful to the sedentary parts, on 
which we might recline and think over the possibility 
of our being rich unawares. We hastened thither, 
but apparently many had had the same idea. 
There was not a bench vacant. The same was 
true in Independence Square and in Franklin Square. 
We will never make a good loafer. There is too 
much competition. 

So we came back, sadly, to our rolltop and fell to 
musing. We picked up a magazine and found some 
pictures showing how Mary Pickford washes her 
hair. "If I am sun-drying my hair," said Mary 
(under a photo showing her reclining in a lovely 
garden doing just that), "I usually have the oppor- 
timity to read a scenario or do some other duty 
which requires concentration." And it occurred to 
us that if a strain like that is put upon a weak 
woman we surely ought to be able to go on moiling 
for a while, Indian summer or not. And then we 
found some pictures by our favourite artist. Coles 
Phillips, with that lovely shimmer aroimd the ankles, 
and we resolved to be strong and brave and have 
[146] 



Fall Fever 

pointed finger-nails. But still, in the back of our 
mind, the debilitating influence of faU fever was at 
work. We said to ourself, without the slightest 
thought of printing it (for it seemed to put us in a 
false light), that the one triumphant and imanswer- 
able epigram of mankind, the grandest and most 
resolute utterance ia the face of implacable fate, is 
the snore. 



[147 



TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS 

WILL the hand-organ man please call? Our 
wife has dug up our old overcoat and insists 
on giving it to him. We intended to give it to the 
Honolulu Girls around at the Walnut Theatre, they 
looked a bit goose-fleshed last week, but we always 
have hay fever when we get near those grass skirts. 
Grass widows is what the profession calls the 
Hawaiian ladies. Hope the temperature isn't going 
up again. We love the old-fashioned Christmas and 
all that sort of thing. Nipping air makes cheeks 
pink; we love to see them nestled in fur coats on 
Chestnut Street. This is the time of year to do un- 
expected kindnesses. We know one man who 
stands in line for hours in front of movie theatres 
just in order to shout Merry Christmas through the 
little hole in the glass. Shaving seems less of a bore. 
Newspapers are supposed to be heartless, but they all 
take a hand in trying to help poor children. Find 
ourselves humming hymn tunes. Very odd, haven't 
been to a church for years. Great fun surprising 
people. We've been reading the new phone book; 
noticed several ways in which people might surprise 
each other by calling up and wishing many happy 
[148] 



Two Days Before Christmas 

returns of the day. Why doesn't Beulah R. Wine 
ring up Mrs. Louis F. Beer, for instance? Or, A, D. 
Smoker and Burton J. PuflFer might go around to 
W. C. Matchett, tobacconist, at 1635 South Second 
Street, and buy their Christmas cigars. George 
Wharton Pepper might give Mayme Salt a ring (on 
the phone, that is). What a pleasant voice that 
telephone operatrix has. Here's to you, chUd, and 
many of them. Grand time, Christmas. 

Fine old Anglo-Saxon festival, Christmas. A 
time of jovial cheer and bracing mirth. Must be so, 
because Doctor Frank Crane and Ralph Waldo 
Trine have often said so. Christmas hard on 
people like that, however: they are bursting with 
the Christmas spirit all the year round; very trying 
when the real occasion comes. That's the beauty of 
having a peevish and surly disposition: when one 
softens up at Christmas everybody notices it and is 
pleased. Chaucer, fine old English poet, first 
English humorist, gave good picture of Christmas 
cheer more than five hundred years ago. Never 
quoted on Christmas cards, why not copy it here.' 
Chaucer's spelling very like Ring Lardner's, but good 
sort just the same. Says he: 

And this was, as thise bookes me remembre, 
The colde, frosty sesoun of Decembre. . . 
The bittre frostes with the sleet and reyn 
Destroyed hath the grene in every yard; 

[149] 



Pipefuls 

Janus sit by the fyre with double beard. 
And drynketh of his bugle horn the wya; 
Bif orn hym stant brawn of the tusked swyn, 
And "Nowel " crieth every lusty man. 

Janus, god of doors, what we cafl nowadays a 
janitor. Had two faces so he could watch the front 
and back door at once and get a double tip at 
Christmas time. Also, that was why he wore a 
beard; too much trouble to shave. We don't cry 
Nowel any more; instead we petition the janitor to 
send up a little more steam. But what a jolly 
picture Chaucer gives of Christmas! Wine to 
drink (fine ruddy wine, as red as the holly berries), 
crackling flitch of pig to eat, and a merry cry of wel- 
come sounding at the threshold as your friends come 
stamping in through the snow. 

Grand time, Christmas! No one is really a 
Philadelphian until he has waited for a Pine Street 
car on a snowy night. Please have my seat, madam, 
there's plenty of room on the strap. Wonder why 
the pavement on Chestnut Street is the slipperiest 
in the world? Always fall down just in front of our 
bank; most embarrassing; hope the paying teller 
doesn't see us. Very annoying to lose our balance 
just there. Awfully nice little girl in there who 
balances the books. Has a kind heart. The count- 
less gold of a merry heart, as William Blake said. 
She looks awfully downcast when our balance gets 
the way it is now. Hate to disappoint her. Won't 
1150] 



Two Days Before Christmas 

have our book balanced again for a devil of a while. 
Even the most surly is full of smiles nowadays. 
Most of us when we fall on the pavement (did you 
ever try it on Chestnut between Sixth and Seventh 
on a slippery day?) ciu-se the granolithic trust and 
wamble there groaning. But not nowadays. Make 
the best of things. Fine panorama of spats. 

Association of ideas. Everybody wears silk 
stockings at Christmas time. Excessive geniality of 
the ad-writers. Uproarious good cheer. Makes 
one almost ashamed to notice the high price of every- 
thing. Radicals being deported. Why not deport 
Santa Claus, too.'* Very radical notion that, love 
your neighbour better than yourself. Easy to do; 
very few of us such dam fools as to love ourselves, 
but so often when you love your neighbour she 
doesn't return it. Nice little boxes they have at the 
ten-cent stores, all covered with poinsettia flowers, to 
put presents in. Wonder when poinsettia began to 
be used as a Christmas decoration and why.? Every- 
one in ten-cent store calls them "poinsiettas," but 
named after J. R. Poinsett. Encyclopedia very 
handy at times; makes a good Christmas present, 
one dollar down and a dollar a month for life. No- 
body can tell the diflference between real pearls and 
imitation; somebody ought to put the oysters wise. 
Save them a lot of trouble and anxiety. Don't' 
know just what duvetyne is, but there seems to be a 

[151] 



Pipefuls 

lot of it drunk nowadays, Hope that clockwork 
train for the Urchin will arrive soon; we were hoping 
to have three happy evenings playing with it before 
he sees it. Fine to have children; lots of fun playing 
with their presents. We are sure that life after 
death is really so, because children always kick the 
blankets off at night. Pine bit of symbolism that; 
put it in a sermon, unless Doctor Conwell gets there 
first. 

Grand time, Christmas ! We vowed to try to take 
down our weight this winter, and then they put 
sugar back on the menu, and doughnut shops spring 
up on every street, and Charles F. Jenkins sent us 
a big sack of Pocono buckwheat flour and we're eat- 
ing a basketful of griddle cakes every morning for 
breakfast. Terrible to be a coward; we always turn 
on the hot water first in the shower bath, except the 
first morning we used it. The plumber got the in- 
dicator on the wrong way round, and when you turn 
to the place marked HOT it comes down hke ice. 
Our idea of a really happy man is the fellow driving a 
wagonload of truck just in front of a trolley car, 
holding it back all the way downtown; when he hears 
the motorman clanging away he pretendfe he thinks 
it's the Christmas chimes and sings "Hark the 
Herald Angels." 

Speakiug of Herald Angels reminds us of a good 
story about James Gordon Bennett; we'U spring it 
one of these days when we're hard up for copy. 
[152] 



Two Days Before Christmas 

Jack Frost must be a married man, did you see him 
try to cover up the show windows with his Uttle 
traceries the other day when the shopping was at its 
height? There was a pert little hat in a window on 
Walnut Street we were very much afraid someone 
might see; the frost saved us. Don't forget to put 
Red Cross seals on your letters. Delightful to 
watch the faces on the streets at Christmas time. 
Everybody trying hard to be pleasant; sometimes 
rather a strain. Curious things faces — some of them 
seem almost human; queer to think that each be- 
longs to someone and no chance to get rid of it; sorry 
we're not in the mirror industry; never thought of it 
before, but it ought to be profitable. Happier most 
of us, if mirrors never had been invented. Hope all 
our nice-natiu'ed clients will have the best kind of a 
time; forgive us for not answering letters; we are too 
disillusioned about ourself to make any resolutions to 
do better. We're going home now; on the way we'll 
think of a lot of nice things we might have said, 
write them down and use them to-morrow. Hope 
Dorothy Gish will get something nice in her stocking. 
Don't make the obvious retort. Grand time, 
Christmas! 



[153 



IN WEST PHILADELPHIA 




CLIMBING aboard car No. 13 — ominously 
labelled "Mt. Moriah" — I voyaged toward 
West Philadelphia. It was a keen day, the first 
snow of winter had fallen, and sparkling gushes of 
chill swept inward every time the side doors opened. 
The conductor, who gets the full benefit of this 
ventilatioij, was feeling cynical, and seeing his blue 
hands I didn't blame him. Long lines of ladies, fumb- 
ling with their little bags and waiting for change, 
stepped off one by one into the windy eddies of the 
street corners. One came up to pay her fare ten 
blocks or so before her destination, and then retired 
to her seat again. This puzzled the conductor and 
Tie rebuked her. The argument grew busy. To the 
amazement of the passengers this richly dressed 
female brandished lusty epithets. "You Irish 
[ 154 ] 



In West Philadelphia 

mick!" she said. (One would not have believed it 
possible if he had not heard it.) "That's what I 
am, and proud of it," said he. The shopping 
solstice is not all fur coats and pink cheeks. If you 
watch the conductors in the blizzard season, and see 
the slings and arrows they have to bear, you will coin 
a new maxim. The conductor is always right. 

It is always entertaining to move for a Uttle in a 
college atmosphere. I stopped at College Hall at 
the University and seriously contemplated slipping in 
to a lecture. The hallways were crowded with 
earnest youths of both sexes — ^I was a bit surprised 
at the number of co-eds, particularly the number 
with red hair — discussing the tribulations of their lot. 
"Think of it," said one man, "I'm a senior, and 
carrying twenty-three hom-s. Got a thesis to do, 
20,000 words." On a bulletin board I observed the 
results of a "General Intelligence Exam." It ap- 
pears that 1,770 students took part. They were 
listed by numbers, not by names. It was not stated 
what the perfect mark would have been; the highest 
grade attained was 159, by Mr. (or Miss.?) 735. The 
lowest mark was 23. I saw that both 440 and 1124 
got the mark of 149. If these gentlemen (or ladies) 
are eager to play off the tie, it would be a pleasure to 
arrange a deciding competition for them. The 
elaborate care with which the boys and girls ignore 
one another as they pass in the halls was highly 
delightful, and reminded me of exactly the same 

[ 155 ] 



Pipefuls 

thing at Oxford. But I saw the possible beginning 
of true romance in the following notice on one of the 
boards: 

WANTED: Names and addresses of ten nice 
American university students who must remain in 
Philadelphia over Christmas, away from home, to be 
invited to a Christmas Eve party to help entertain 
some Bryn Mawr College girls in one of the nicest 
homes in a suburb of Philadelphia. 

Certainly there is the stage set for a short story. 
Perhaps not such a short one, either. 

Natxu-ally I could not resist a visit to the library, 
where most of the readers seemed wholly absorbed, 
though one student was gaping forlornly over a 
volume of Tennyson. I found an intensely amusing 
book, "Who's Who in Japan," a copy of which 
would be a valuable standby to a newspaper para- 
grapher in his bad moments. For instance: 

SASAKI, TETSTJTARo: One of the highest tax- 
payers of Fukushima-ken, President of the Hongu 
Reeling Partnership, Director of the Dai Nippon 
Radium Water Co.; brewer, reeler; born Aug., 1860. 

SAKURAi, ICHISAKU : Member of the Niigata City 
Coimcil; Director of the Niigata Gas Co., Niigata 
Savings Bank. Born June, 1872, Studied Japanese 
and Chinese classics and arithmetic. At present 
also he connects with the Niigata Orphanage and 
various other philanthropic bodies. Was imprisoned 
by acting contrary to the act of exp>osive compound 
for seven years. Recreations: reading. Western 
wine. 

[156] 



In West Philadelphia 

Relying on my apparent similarity to the average 
midergrad, I plmiged into the sancta of Houston 
Hall and bought a copy of the Punch Bowl. What 
that sprightly journal calls "A little group of 
Syria's thinkers" was shooting pool. The big fire- 
places, like most fireplaces ia American colleges, 
don't seem to be used. They don't even show any 
traces of ever having been used, a curious contrast to 
the always blazing hearths of English colleges. The 
latter, however, are more necfessary, as in England 
there is usually no other source of warmth. A 
bitter skirmish of winds, carrying powdered snow 
dust, nipped round the gateways of the dormitories 
and Tait MacKenzie's fine statue of Whitefield stood 
sharply outlined against a cold blue sky. I lunched 
at a varsity hash counter on Spruce Street and 
bought tobacco in a varsity drug store, where a New 
York tailor, over for the day, was cajoling students 
into buying his "snappy styles" in time for Christ- 
mas. There is no more interesting game than 
watching a lot of college men, trying to pick out 
those who may be of some value to the community in 
future — the scientists, poets, and teachers of the next 
generation. The well-dressed youths one sees in the 
varsity drug stores are not generally of this type. 

The Evans School of Dentistry at Fortieth and 
Spruce is a surprising place. Its grotesque gar- 
goyles, showing (with true medieval humour) the 
sufferings of tooth patients, are the first thing one 

[157] 



Pipefuls 

notices. Then one finds the museum, in which is 
housed Doctor Thomas W. Evans's collection of 
paintings and curios brought back from France. 
Unfortunately there seems to be no catalogue of the 
items, so that there is no way of knowing what inter- 
esting associations belong to them. But most siu*- 
pristQg of all is to find the travelling carriage of the 
Empress Eugenie in which she fled from France in 
the fatal September days of 1870. She spent her 
last night in France at the home of Doctor Evans, 
and there is a spirited painting by Dupray showing 
her leaving his house the next morning, ushered into 
the carriage by the courtly doctor. The old black 
barouche, or whatever one calls it, seems in perfect 
-condition still, with the empress's monogram on the 
door panel. Only the other day we read in the 
papers that the remarkable old lady (now in her 
ninety-fourth year) has been walking about Paris, 
revisiting well-known scenes. How it would sur- 
prise her to see her carriage again here in this 
University building in West Philadelphia. The 
whole museum is delightfully French in flavour; as 
soon as one enters one seems to step back into the 
curiously bizarre and tragic extravagance of the 
Second Empire. 

One passes into the dignified and placid residence 

section of Spruce and Pine streets, with its distinctly 

academic air. Behind those quiet walls one suspects 

(bookcases and studious professors and all the de- 

[ 158 ] 



In West Philadelphia 

lightful passions of the mind. On Baltimore Avenue 
the wintry sun shone white and cold; in Clark Park, 
Charles Dickens wore a little cap of snow, and Little 
Nell looked more pathetic than ever. There is a 
breath of mystery about Baltimore Avenue. What 
does that large sign mean, in front of a house near 
Clark Park— THE EASTERN TRAVELLERS.? 
Then one comes to the famous shop of S. F. Hiram, 
the Dodoneaean Shoemaker he calls himself. This 
wise coloured man has learned the advertising ad- 
vantages of the unusual. His placard reads : 

Originator of that famous Dobrupolyi System of 
repairing. 

When one enters and asks to know more about 
this system, he points to another placard, which says : 

It assumes the nature and character of an appella- 
tive noun, and carries the article The System. 

His shop contains odd curios as weU as the usual 
traffic of a cobbler. "The public loves to be hood- 
wioked,' he adds sagely. 



[159] 



HORACE TRAUBEL 

WE WAIT with particular interest to hear what 
Philadelphia will have to say about the pass- 
ing of Horace Traubel. Traubel was the official echo 
of the Great Voice of Camden, and in his obituary one 
may discern the vivacity of the Whitman tradition. 
This is a matter of no small concern to the curators of 
the Whitman cult. The soul of Philadelphia cannot 
be kept alive by conventions and statistics alone. 
Such men as Traubel have helped. 

There are two kinds of rebels. By their neckties 
you may know them. Walt Whitman was of the 
kind that wears no necktie at all. Then there is the 
ffxf] lesser sort, of which Trau- 

bel was one — the rebel who 
Vi^ears a flowing black bow 
tie with long trailers. 
Elbert Hubbard wore one 
of these. It is a mild re- 
bellion of which this is 
symbol. It often goes 
with shell spectacles. 
We never knew Horace Traubel, though he was 
the man we most wanted to meet when we came to 
[160] 




Horace Traubel 

Philadelphia. We have heard men of all conditions 
speak of him with affection and respect. He was 
dedicated from boyhood to the Whitman cause^ 
From Walt himself he caught the habit of talking 
about Walt, and he carried it on with as much gusto 
and happiness as Walt did. Only recently he said in 
his little magazine The Conservator: 

When I was quite small I used to want to be a 
great man. But in my observations of the old man's 
better than great way of meeting the gifts as well as 
the reverses of fate I didn't want to be a great man. 
I only wanted to stay unannexed to any institution 
as he was. No college ever decorated him. For the 
best of reasons. No coUege could. He could 
decorate them. 

So Traubel remained unannexed. He was fired 
from a bank because he happened to take issue in 
public with one of the bank's chief depositors. He 
floated about happily, surroimded by young Whit- 
man disciples, carrying on his guerrilla for what his 
leader called the "peerless, passionate, good cause" 
of human democracy. His little magazine led a 
precarious life, supported by good friends. His pro- 
test against iniquities was an honest, good-humoured 
protest. 

Horace Traubel will be remembered, as he wished 
to be remembered, as the biographer of Whitman. 
Whitman also, we may add, wished Traubel to be so 
remembered. In his carefid record of the Camden 

[ 161 ] 



Pipefuls 

sage's utterances and pulse-beats he approached (as 
nearly as any one) the devoted dignity of Boswell. 
We were about to say the seK-efiPacing devotion of 
Boswell; but the beauty of biography is that the 
biographer cannot wholly delete himself from the 
book. One is always curious about the recording 
instrument. When we see a particularly fine 
photograph our first question is always, "What kind 
of camera was it taken with? " 

It seems to us — speaking only by intuition, for we 
never knew him — that Traubel was a happy man. 
He was untouched by many of the harassing ambi- 
tions that make the lives of prosperous men miser- 
able. He was touched in boyhood by one simple 
and overmastering motive — to carry on the Whit- 
man message and spread it out for the yoimger 
world. Much of the dunnage of life he cast over- 
board. He was too good a Whitman disciple to 
estimate success in the customary terms. When he 
left his job in the bank he opened an account in the 
Walt Whitman philosophy — ^and he kept a healthy 
balance there to the end. 



[1621 



TALES OF TWO CITIES 

n. NEW YORK 



THE ANATOMY OF MANHATTAN 

SHE is the only city whose lovers live always in a 
mood of wonder and expectancy. There are 
others where one may sink peacefully, contentedly 
into the life of the town, aflfectionate and under- 
standing of its ways. But she, the woman city, who 
is bold enough to say he understands her? The 
secret of her thrilling and inscrutable appeal has 
never been told. How could it be? She has always 
been so much greater than any one who has lived 
with her. (Shall we mention Walt Whitman as the 
only possible exception? O. Henry came very near 
to her, but did he not melodramatize her a little, 
sometimes cheapen her by his epigrammatic ap- 
praisal, fit her too neatly into his plot? Kipling 
seemed to see her only as the brutal, heedless wan- 
ton.) Truly the magic of her spell can never be 
exacted. She changes too rapidly, day by day. 
Realism, as they call it, can never catch the bound- 
aries of her pearly beauty. She needs a mystic. 

No city so challenges and debilitates the imagina- 
tion. Here, where wonder is a daily companion, 
desire to tell her our ecstasy becomes at last only a 
faint pain in the mind. If you would mute a poet's 

[165] 



Pipefuls 

lyre, put him on a ferry from Jersey City some silver 
April morning; or send him aboard at Liberty Street 
in an October dusk. Poor soul, his mind will buzz 
(for years to come) after adequate sp>eech to tell 
those cliffs and scarps, amethyst and lilac in the 
mingled light; the clear topaz chequer of window 
panes; the dull bluish olive of the river, streaked and 
crinkled with the churn of the screw! Many a poet 
has come to her in the wooing passion. Give him 
six months, he is merely her Platonist. He lives 
content with placid companionship. Where are his 
adjectives, his verbs.'' That inward knot of amaze- 
ment, what speech can unravel it.!* 

Her air, when it is typical, is light, dry, cool. It is 
pale, it is faintly tinctured with pearl and opal. 
Heaven is unbelievably remote ; the city itself daring 
so high, heaven lifts in a cautious remove. Light 
and shadow are fantastically banded, striped, and 
patchworked among her cavern streets; a cool, deep 
gloom is cut across with fierce jags and blinks of 
brightness. She smiles upon man who takes his 
ease in her colossal companionship. Her clean soar- 
ing perpendiculars call the eye upward. One 
wanders as a botanist in a tropical forest. That 
great smooth groinery of the Pennsylvania Station 
train shed: is it not the arching fronds of iron palm 
trees? Oh, to be a botanist of this vivid jungle, 
spread all about one, anatomist of the ribs and veins 
that run from the great backbone of Broadway! 
[166] 



Anatomy of Manhattan 

To love her, one thinks, is to love one's fellows; 
each of them having some unknown share in her 
loveliness. Any one of her streets would be the 
study and delight of a lifetime. To speak at random, 
we think of that little world of brightness and sound 
bourgeois cheer that spreads around the homely 
Verdi statue at Seventy-third Street. We have a 
faithful affection for that neighbourhood, for reasons 
of our own. Within a radius, thereabouts, of a 
quarter-mile each way, we could live a year and learn 
new matters every day. They call us a hustling 
folk. Observe the tranquil afternoon light in those 
brownstone byways. Pass along leisurely Amster- 
dam Avenue, the region of small and genial shops, 
Amsterdam Avenue of the many laundries. See the 
children trooping upstairs to their own room at the 
St. Agnes branch of the Public Library. See the 
taxi drivers, sitting in their cars alongside the Verdi 
grass plot (a rural breath of new-mown turf sweet- 
ening the warm, crisp air) and smoking pipes. Every 
one of them is to us as fascinating as a detective 
story. What a hand they have had in ten thousand 
romances. At this very moment, what quaint 
and many-stranded destinies may hail them and 
drive off? But there they sit, placid enough, with a 
pipe and the afternoon paper. The light, fluttering 
dresses of enigmatic fair ones pass gayly on the 
pavement. Traffic flows, divides, and flows on, a 
sparkling river. Here is that mystery, a human 

[167] 



Pipefuls 

being, buying a cigar. Here is another mystery 
asking for a glass of frosted chocolate. Why is it 
that we cannot accost that tempting riddle and ask 
him to give us an accurate pr6cis of his life to date? 
And that red-haired burly sage, he who used to bake 
the bran muflobis in the little lunchroom near by, 
and who lent us his Robby Burns one night — what 
has become of him.-* 

So she teases us, so she allures. Sometimes, on 
the L, as one passes along that winding channel 
where the walls and windows come so close, there is 
a felicitous sense of being immersed, surrounded, 
drowned in a great, generous ocean of humanity. 
It is a fine feeling. All life presses around one, the 
throb and the problem are close, are close. Who 
could be weary, who could be at odds with life, in 
such an embrace of destiny? The great tall sides of 
buildings fly open, the human hive is there, beautiful 
and arduous beyond belief. Here is our worship 
and here our lasting joy, here is our immortality of 
encouragement. Yes, perhaps O. Henry did say the 
secret after all: "He saw no longer a rabble, but his 
brothers seeking the ideal." 



[168] 



VESEY STREET 




THE first duty of the conscientious explorer is to 
study his own neighbourhood, so we set off to 
famiUarize ourself with Vesey Street, This amiable 
byway (perhaps on account of the proximity of 
Washington Market) bases its culture on a solid 
appreciation of the virtue of good food, an admirable 
trait in any street. Upon this firm foundation it 
erects a seemly interest in letters. The wanderer 
who passes up the short channel of our street, from 
the docks to St. Paul's churchyard, must not be 

[169] 



Pipefuls 

misled by the character of the books the bibliothe- 
caries display in their windows. Outwardly they 
lure the public by Bob IngersoU's lectures, Napo- 
leon's Dream Book, eflSciency encyclopaedias and 
those odd and highly coloured small brochures of 
smoking-car tales of the Slow Train Through 
Arkansaw type. But once you penetrate, you may 
find quarry of a more stimulating kind. For 
fifteen cents we eloped with a first edition of Bun- 
ner's "Love in Old Cloathes," which we were glad to 
have in memory of the "old red box on Vesey 
Street" which Bunner immortalized in rhyme, and 
which still stands (is it the same box.-^) by the rail- 
ing of St. Paul's. Also, even nobler treasure to our 
way of thinking, did we not just now find (for fifteen 
cents) Hilaire Belloc's "Hills and the Sea," that en- 
chanting little volume of essays, which we are almost 
afraid to read again. Belloc, the rogue — the devil is 
in him. Such a lusty beguilery moves in his nimble 
prose that after reading him it is hard not to fall 
into a clumsy imitation of his lively and frolic manner. 
There is at least one essayist in this city who fell 
subject to the hilarious Hilaire years ago. It is an 
old jape but not such a bad one: our friend Murray 
Hill will never return to the status quo ante Belloc. 
But we were speaking of Vesey Street. It looks 
down to the water, and the soft music of steamship 
whistles comes tuning on a cold, gusty air. Thor- 
oughly mundane little street, yet not unmindful of 
[170] 



Vesey Street 

matters spiritual, bounded as it is by divine Provi- 
dence at one end (St. Paul's) and by Providence, 
R. I. (the Providence Line. pier) at the other. Per- 
haps it is the presence of the graveyard that has 
startled Vesey Street into a curious reversal of cus- 
tom. On most other streets, we think, the numbers 
of the houses run even on the south side, odd on the 
north. But just the opposite on Vesey. You will 
find aU even numbers on the north, odd on the south. 
Still, Wall Street errs in the same way. 

If marooned or quarantined on Vesey Street a man 
might lead a life of gayety and sound nourishment for 
a considerable while, without having recourse to 
more exalted thoroughfares. There are lodging 
houses in that row of old buildings down toward the 
docks; from the garret windows he could see masts 
moving on the river. For food he would live high 
indeed. Where will one see such huge glossy blue- 
black grapes; such enormous Indian River grape- 
fruit; such noble display of fish — scallops, herrings, 
smelts, and the larger kind with their dead and 
desolate eyes? There are pathetic rows of rabbits, 
frozen stifif in the bitter cold wind; huge white hares 
hanging in rows; a tray of pigeons with their irides- 
cent throat feathers catching gleams of the pale 
sunlight. There are great sacks of nuts, barrels of 
cranberries, kegs of olive oil, thick slabs of yellow 
cheese. On such a cold day it was pleasant to see a 
sign "Peanut Roasters and Warmers.' 

[171] 



Pipefuls 

Passing the gloomy vista of Greenwich Street — 
under the "L" is one of those mysterious httle vents 
in the floor of the street from which issues a continual 
spout of steam — our Vesey grows more intellectual. 
The first thing one sees, going easterly, is a sign: 
The Truth Seeker, One flight Up. The tempta- 
tion is almost irresistible, but then Truth is always 
one flight higher up, so one reflects, what's the use? 
In this block, while there is still much doing in the 
way of food — and even food in the live state, a 
window full of entertaining chicks and ducklings 
clustered round a colony brooder — another of Vesey 
Street's interests begins to show itself. Tools. 
Every kind of tool that gladdens the heart of man is 
displayed in various shops. One realizes more and 
more that this is a man's street, and indeed (except 
at the meat market) few of the gayer sex are to be 
seen along its pavements. One of the tool shops has 
open-air boxes with all manner of miscellaneous odd- 
ments, from mouse traps to oil cans, and you may 
see delighted enthusiasts p>oring over the assortment 
with the same professional delight that ladies show at 
a notion counter. One of the tool merchants, how- 
ever, seems to have weakened in his love of city 
existence, for he has put up a placard: 

Wanted To Rent 

Small Farm 
Must Have Fruit and Spring Water 

[172] 



Vesey Street 

How many years of repressed yearning may speak 
behind that modest ambition! 

Our own taste for amusement leads us (once 
luncheon dispatched; you should taste Vesey 
Street's lentil soup) to the second-hand bookshops. 
Our imagined castaway, condemned to live on Vesey 
Street for a term of months, would never need to 
languish for mental stimulation. Were he devout, 
there is always St. Paul's, as we have said; and were 
he atheist, what a collection of Bob IngersoU's 
essays greets the faring eye ! There is the customary 
number of copies of "The Pentecost of Calamity"; 
it seems to the frequenter of second-hand bazaars as 
though almost everybody who bought that lively 
booklet in the early days of the war must have sold it 
again since the armistice. Much rarer, we saw 
a copy of "Hopkins's Pond," that little volume of 
agreeable sketches written so long ago by Dr. 
Robert T. Morris, the well-known surgeon, and if we 
had not already a copy which the doctor inscribed for 
us we would certainly have rescued it from this 
strange exile. 

There are only two of the really necessary delights 
of life that the Vesey Street maroon would miss. 
There is no movie, there are no doughnuts. We are 
wondering whether in any part of this city there has 
sprung up the great doughnut craze that has ravaged 
Philadelphia in the past months. As soon as 
prohibition became a certainty, certain astute 

[173] 



Pipefuls 

merchants of the Quaker City devoted themselves to 
inoculating the public with a taste for these humble 
fritters, and now they bubble gayly in the windows 
of Philadelphia's most aristocratic thoroughfare. It 
is really a startling sight to see Philadelphia lining 
up for its noonday quota of doughnuts, and the 
merchants over there have devised an ingenious 
method of tempting the crowd. A funnel, erected 
over the frying sinkers, carries the fragrant fumes 
out through a transom and gushes it into the open 
air, so that the sniff of doughnuts is perceptible all 
down the block. There is a fortune waiting on 
Vesey Street for the man who will establish a dough- 
nut f oimdry, and we solemnly pledge our own appe- 
tite and that of all our friends toward his success.* 

At its upper end, perhaps in memory of the van- 
ished Astor House, Vesey Street stirs itself into a 
certain magnificence, devoting its window space to 
jewellery and silver-mounted books of prayer. At this 
window one may regulate his watch at a clock war- 
ranted by Charles Frodsham of 84, Strand, to whose 
solid British accuracy we hereby pay decent tribute. 
Over all this varied scene lifts the shining javelin- 
head of the Woolworth Building, seen now and then 
in an almost disbelieved glimpse of sublimity; and 
the golden Lightning of the Telephone and Telegraph 
pinnacle, waving his zigzag brands in the sun. 

*Since this was written, the lack has been supplied — on Park Row, .'just 
above the top of Vesey Street; probably the most luxurious doughnut 
shop ever conceived. 

[174] 



BROOKLYN BRIDGE 




A WINDY day, one would have said in the dark 
channels of downtown ways. In the chop 
house on John Street, lunch-time patrons came 
blustering in, wrapped in overcoats and muflBlers, 
with something of that air of ostentatious hardiness 
that men always assume on coming into a warm 
room from a cold street. Thick chops were hissing 
on the rosy griU at the foot of the stairs. In one of 
the little crowded stalls a man sat with a glass of 
milk. It was the first time we had been in that chop 
house for several years ... it doesn't seem the 

[175] 



Pipefuls 

same. As Mr. Wordsworth said, it is not now as it 
hath been of yore. But still. 

The homely Nurse doth all she can 

To make her foster-child, her Inn-mate Man, 

Forget the glories he hath known. 

It's a queer thing that all these imitation beers taste 
to us exactly as real beer did the first time we tasted 
it (we were seven years old) and shuddered. "Two 
glasses of cider," we said to the comely serving maid. 
Alas 

That natiu-e yet remembers 
What was so fugitive. 

There is a nice point of etiquette involved in lunching 
in a crowded chop house. Does the fact of having 
bought and eaten a moderate meal entitle one to sit 
with one's companion for a placid talk and smoke 
afterward.? Or is one compelled to relinquish the 
table as soon as one is finished, to make place for 
later comers? These last are standing menacingly 
near by, gazing bitterly upon us as we look over the 
card and debate the desirability of having some 
tapioca pudding. But our presiding Juno has 
already settled the matter, and made courtesy a 
matter of necessity. "These gentlemen will be 
through in a moment," she says to the new candi- 
dates. Our companion, the amiable G W , 

was just then telling us of a brand of synthetic 
[176] 



Brooklyn Bridge 

whiskey now being distilled by a famous tavern of 
the underworld. The superlative charm of this 
beverage seems to be the extreme rigidity it imparts 
to the persevering commimicant. "What does it 
taste like?" we asked. "Rather like gnawing 

furniture," said G W . "It's like a long, 

healthy draught of shellac. It seems to me that it 
would be less trouble if you offered the barkeep fifty 
cents to hit you over the head with a hammer. The 
general effect would be about the same, and you 
wouldn't feel nearly so bad in the morning." 

A windy day, and perishing chill, we thought as 
we stroUed through the gloomy caverns and crypts 
underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Those twisted 
vistas seen through the archways give an impression 
of wrecked Louvain. A great bonfire was burning in 
the middle of the street. Under the Pearl Street 
elevated the sunlight drifted through the girders in a 
lively chequer, patterning piles of gray-black snow 
with a criss-cross of brightness. We had wanted to 
show oiir visitor Franklin Square, which he, as a man 
of letters, had always thought of as a trimly gardened 
plot sin-rounded by quiet little old-fashioned houses 
with brass knockers, and famous authors tripping in 
and out. As we stood examining the fa9ade of Har- 
per and Brothers, our friend grew nervous. He was 
carryiug luider his arm the dummy of an "export 
catalogue" for a big brass foundry, that being his 
line of work. "They'll think we're free verse poets 

[177] 



Pipefuls 

trying to get up courage enough to go in and submit 
a manuscript," he said, and dragged us away. 

A windy day, we had said in the grimy recesses of 
CHff and Dover streets. (Approaching this senti- 
ment for the third time, perhaps we may be per- 
mitted to accompHsh our thought and say what we 
had in mind.) But up on the airy decking of the 

Brooklyn Bridge, where we repaired with G 

W for a brief stroll, the afternoon seemed mUd 

and tranquil. It is a mistake to assume that the 
open spaces are the windier. The subway is New 
York's home of iEolus, and most of the gusts that 
bufPet us on the streets are merely hastening round a 
corner in search of the nearest subway entrance so 
that they can get down there where they feel they 
belong. Up on the bridge it was plain to perceive 
that the March sunshine had elements of strength. 
The air was crisp but genial. A few pedestrians 
were walking resolutely toward the transpontine 
borough; the cop on duty stood outside his little 
cabin with the air of one imgrieved by care. Behind 
us stood the high profiles of the lower city, 
sharpened against the splendidly clear blue sky 
which is New York's special blessing. On the water 
moved a large tug, towing barges. Smoke trailed 
behind it in the same easy and comfortable way that 
tobacco reek gushes over a man's shoulder when he 
walks across a room puffing his pipe. 

The bridge is a curiously delightful place to 
178 



Brooklyn Bridge 

watch the city from. Walking toward the central 
towers seems like entering a vast spider's web. The 
footway between the criss-cross cables draws one 
inward with a queer fascination, the perspective 
diminishing the network to the eye so that it seems 
to tighten round you as you advance. Even when 
there is but little traffic the bridge is never stiU. It 
is alive, trembling, vibrant, the foot moves with a 
springy recoil. One feels the lift and strain of 
gigantic forces, and looks in amazement on the huge 
sagging hawsers that carry the load. The bars and 
rods quiver, the whole lively fabric is full of a 
tremor, but one that conveys no sense of in- 
secureness. It trembles as a tree whispers in a 
light air. 

And of the view from the bridge, it is too sweeping 
to carry wholly in mind. Best, one thinks, it is seen 
in a winter dusk, when the panes of Manhattan's 
mountains are stUl blazing against a crystal blue- 
green sky, and the last flush of an orange siuiset 
lingers in the west. Such we saw it once, coming 
over from Brooklyn, very hungry after walking in 
most of the way from Jamaica, and pledged in our 
own resolve not to break fast until reaching a certain 
inn on Pearl Street where they used to serve banana 
omelets. Dusk simplifies the prospect, washes 
away the lesser units, fills in the foreground with 
obliterating shadow, leaves only the monstrous 
sierras of Broadway jagged against the vault. 

[179] 



Pipefuls 

It deepens this incredible panorama into broad 
sweeps of gold and black and peacock blue which one 
may file away in memory, tangled eyries of shining 
windows swimming in empty air. As seen in the 
full brilliance of noonday the bristle of detail is too 
bewildering to carry in one clutch of the senses. 
The eye is distracted by the abysses between build- 
ings, by the uneven elevation of the summits, by the 
jumbled compression of the streets. In the vastness 
of the scene one looks in vain for some guiding 
principle of arrangement by which vision can focus 
itself. It is better not to study this strange and 
disturbing outlook too minutely, lest one lose what 
knowledge of it one has. Let one do as the veteran 
prowlers of the bridge : stroll pensively to and fro in 
the Sim, taking man's miracles for granted, ex- 
hilarated and content. 



[180] 



THREE HOURS FOR LUNCH 

HUDSON Street has a pleasant savour of food. 
It resounds with the dull rumble of cruising 
drays, which bear the names of well-known brands 
of groceries; it is faintly salted by an aroma of the 
docks. One sees great signs announcing cocoanut 
and whalebone or such unusual wares; there is a 
fine tang of coffee in the air roimd about the corner 
of Beach Street. Here is that vast, massy brick 
edifice, the New York Central freight station, built 
1868, which gives an impression of being about to be 
torn down. From a dilapidated upper window 
hangs a faded banner of the Irish Republic. At 
noontime this region shows a mood of repose- 
Truckmen loll in sunny corners, puffing pipes, with 
their curved freight hooks hung round their necks. 
In a dark smithy half a dozen sit comfortably round 
a huge wheel which rests on an anvil, using it as a 
lunch table. Near Canal Street two men are loading 
ice into a yeUow refrigerator car, and their practiced 
motions are pleasant to watch. One stands in the 
wagon and swings the big blocks upward with his 
tongs. The other, on the wagon roof, seizes the 
piece deftly and drops it thi-ough a trap on top of the 

[181] 



Pipefuls 

car. The blocks of ice flash and shimmer as they 
pass through the sunshine. In Jim O'Dea's black- 
smith shop, near Broome Street, fat white horses are 
waiting patiently to be shod, while a pink glow 
wavers outward from the forge. 

At the corner of Hudson and Broome streets we 
fell in with our friend Endymion, it being our pur- 
pose to point out to him the house, one of that 
block of old red dwellings between Hudson and 
Varick, which Robert C. HoUiday has described in 
"Broome Street Straws," a book which we hope is 
known to all lovers of New York local colour. 
Books which have a strong sense of place, and are 
born out of particular streets — and especially streets 
of an odd, rich, and well-worn flavour — are not any 
too frequent. Mr. HoUiday's Gissingesque ap- 
preciation of the humours of landladies and all the 
queer fish that shoal through the backwaters of New 
York lodging houses makes this Broome Street 
neighbourhood exceedingly pleasant for the pilgrim 
to examine. It was in Mr. HolUday's honour that 
we sallied into a Hudson Street haberdashery, just 
opposite the channel of Broome Street, and adorned 
ourself with a new soft collar, also having the 
pleasure of seeing Endymion regretfully wave away 
some gorgeous mauve and pink neckwear that the 
agreeable dealer laid before him with words of 
encouragement. We also stood tranced by a 
marvellous lithograph advertising a roach powder in 
[182] 



Three Hours for Lunch 

a neighbouring window, and wondered whether Mr. 
Holliday himself could have drawn the original in the 
days when he and Walter Jack Duncan lived in 
garrets on Broome Street and were art students 




together. Certainly this picture had the vigorous 
and spirited touch that one would expect from the 
draughting wrist of Mr. Holliday. It showed a very 
terrible scene, apparently a civil war among the 
roaches, for one army of these agile insects was 
treasonously squirting a house with the commended 
specific, and the horrified and stricken inmates were 
streaming forth and being carried away in roach 
ambulances, attended by roach nurses, to a neigh- 
bouring roach cemetery. All done on a large and 
telling scale, with every circumstance of dismay and 
reproach on the faces of the dying blattidse. Not 
even our candour, which is immense, permits us to 
reprint the slogan the manufacturer has adopted for 

[183] 



Pipefuls 

his poster: those who go prowling on Hudson 
Street may see it for themselves. 

In the old oyster and chop house just below Canal 
Street we enjoyed a very agreeable lunch. To this 
place the Broome Street garreteers (so Mr. Holliday 
has told us) used to come on days of high prosperity 
when some cheque arrived from a publisher. At 
that time the tavern kept an open fireplace, with a 
bright nest of coals in the chilly season; and there 
was a fine mahogany bar. But we are no laudator of 
acted time: the fireplace has been bricked up, it is 
true; but the sweet cider is admirable, and as for the 
cheesecake, we would back it against all the Times 
Square variety that Ben De Casseres rattles about. 
It is delightful and surprising to find on Hudson 
Street an ordinary so droll and Dickensish in at- 
mosphere, and next door is a window bearing the 
sign Walter Peter. We feel sure that Mr. 
Holliday, were he still living in those parts, would 
have cajoled the owner into changing that e to an a. 

Our stroU led us north as far as Charlton Street, 
which the geographers of Greenwich VUlage claim as 
the lower outpost of their domain. Certainly it is a 
pleasing byway, rimning quietly through the after- 
noon, and one lays an envious eye upon the demure 
brick houses, with their old-fashioned doorways, pale 
blue shutters, and the studio windows on the south- 
em side. At the corner of Varick Street is a large 
house showing the sign, "Christopher Columbus 
[184] 



Three Hours for Lunch 

University of America." Macdougal Street gives 
one a distant blink of the thin greenery of Wash- 
ington Square. 

An unexpected impulse led us eastward on Grand 
Street, to revisit Max Maisel's rnterestuig bookshop- 
We had never forgotten the thrill of finding this 
place by chance one night when prowling toward 
Seward Park. In bookshops of a liberal sort we 
always find it advisable to ask first of aU for a copy 
of Frank Harris's "The Man Shakespeare." It is 
hardly ever to be found (unfortmiately), so the 
inquiry is comparatively safe for one ia a frugal 
mood; and it is a tactful question, for the mention of 
this book shows the bookseller that you are an in- 
telligent and understanding kind of person, and 
puts intercourse on good terms at once. However, 
we did find one book that we felt we simply had to 
have, as it is our favourite book for giving away to 
right-minded people — "The Invisible Playmate," 
by William Canton. We fear that there are stiU 
lovers of children who do not know this book; but if 
so, it is not our fault. 

Grand Street is a child at heart, and one may 
watch it making merry not only along the pavement 
but in the shop windows. Endymion's gaUant 
spirit was strongly uplifted by this lively thorough- 
fare, and he strode like one whose heart was hitting 
on all six cylinders. Max Maisel's bookshop alone 
is enough to put on s in a seemly humour. But 

[185] 



Pipefuls 

then one sees the gorgeous pink and green allure- 
ments of the pastry cooks' windows, and who can 
resist those little lemon-flavoured, saffron-coloured 
cakes, which are so thirst-compelling and send one 
hastily to the nearest bar for another beaker of 
cider? And it seems natural to find here the 
oldest toyshop in New York, where Endymion 
dashed to the upper floor in search of juvenile 
baubles, and we both greatly admired the tall, dark, 
and beauteous damsel who waited on us with such 
patience and charity. Endymion by this time was 
convinced that he was living in the very heart and 
climax of a poem; he became more and more unreal 
as we walked along : we could see his physical out- 
line (tenuous enough at best) shimmer and blur as he 
became increasingly alcaic. 

Along the warm crowded pavement there suddenly 
piped a liquid, gurgling, chirring whistle, rising and 
dropping with just the musical trill that floats from 
clumps of creekside willows at this time of year. We 
had passed several birdshops on our walk, and sup- 
posed that another was near. A song sparrow, was 
our instant conclusion, and we halted to see where 
the cage could be hung. And then we saw our 
warbler. He was little and plump and red-faced, 
with a greasy hat and a drooping beer-gilded mous- 
tache, and he wore on his coat a bright blue peddler's 
license badge. He shuffled along, stooping over a 
pouch of tin whistles and gurgling in one as he went. 
[186] 



Three Hours for Lunch 

There's your poem, we said to Endymion — "The 
Song-Sparrow on Grand Street." 

We propose to compile a little handbook for 
truants, which we shall caU "How to Spend Three 
Hours at Lunch Time." This idea occurred to us on 
looking at our watch when we got back to our 
kennel. 



[187] 



PASSAGE FROM SOME MEMOIRS 

HOW LONG ago it seems, that spring noonshine 
when two young men (we will call them Dactyl 
and Spondee) set off to plunder the golden bag of 
Time. These creatures had an oppressive sense that 
first Youth was already fled. For one of them, in 
fact, it was positively his thirtieth birthday; poor 
soul, how decrepitly he flitted in front of motor 
trucks. As for the other, he was far decumbent in 
years, quite of a previous generation, a perfect 
Rameses, whose senile face was wont to crack into 
wrinklish mirth when his palsied cronies called him 
the greatest poet born on February 2, 1886. 

It was a day — ^weU, it is fortunate that some things 
do not have to be described. Suppose one had to 
explain to the pallid people of the thither moon what 
a noonday sunshine is like in New York about the 
Nones of May.!* It could not be done to carry 
credence. Let it be said it was a Day, and leave it 
so. You have all known that gilded envelopment of 
sunshine and dainty air. 

These pitiful creatures arose from the subway at 
Fourteenth Street and took the world in their right 
hands. From this revolving orb, said they, they 
[1881 



Passage from Some Memoirs 

would squeeze a luncheon hour of exquisite satis- 
factions. They gazed sombrely at Union Square, 
and uttered curious reminiscences of the venerable 
days when one of them had worked, actually toiled 
for a living, upon the shores of that expanse. Ten 
years had passed (yes, at least ten — edax rerum!). 
Upon a wall these observant strollers saw a tablet to 
the memory of William Lloyd Garrison. Strange, 
said they, we never noticed this before. Ah, said 
one, this is hallowed ground. It was near here that 
I used to borrow a quarter, the day before pay-day, 
to buy my lunch. The other contributed similar 
recollections. And now, quoth he, I am grown so 
prosperous that when I need money I can't afford to 
borrow less than two hundred dollars. 

They lunched (one brushes away the mist of time 
to recall the details) where the bright sunlight fell 
athwart a tablecloth of excellent whiteness. They 
ate (may one be precise at so great a distance?) — yes, 
they ate broiled mackerel to begin with; the kind of 
mackerel called (but why.^) Spanish. Whereupon 
succeeded a course of honeycomb tripe, which moved 
Dactyl to quoting Rabelais, something that 
Grangousier had said about tripes. Only by these 
tripes is memory supported and made positive, for it 
was the first time either had tackled this dish. 
Concurrent with the tripes, one inducted the other 
into the true mystery of blending shandygaff, 
explaining the first doctrine of that worthy draught, 

[189] 



Pipefuls 



which is that the beer must be poured into the 
beaker before the ginger ale, for so arises a fatter and 
lustier bubblement of foam. The reason whereof 
they leave no testament. While this portion of 
the meal was under discussion their minds moved 
free, unpinioned, with airy lightness, over all manner 
of topics. It seemed no effort at all to talk. Ripe, 
mellow with long experience of men and matters, 
their comments were notable for wisdom and 
sagacity. The waiter, over- 
hearing shreds of their dis- 
course, made a private nota- 
tion to the effect that these 
were Men of Large Affairs. 
Then they embarked upon 
some salty crackers, enlivened 
with Camembert cheese and 
green-gage jam. By this time 
they were touching upon relig- 
ion, from which they moved 
lightly to the poems of Louise 
Imogen Guiney. It is all quite distinct as one 
looks back upon it. 

Issuing upon the street. Dactyl said something 
about going back to the office, but the air and sun- 
light said him nay. Rather, remarked Spondee, let 
us fare forward upon this street and see what 
happens. This is ever a comely doctrine, adds the 
chronicler. They moved gently, not without a lilac 
[190] 




Passage from Some Memoirs 

trailing of tobacco fume, across quiet stretches of 
pavement. In the blue upwardness stood the tower 
of the Metropolitan Life Building, a reminder that 
humanity as a whole pays its premiums with decent 
regularity. They conned the nice gradations of tint 
in the spring foliage of Gramercy Park. They 
talked, a little soberly, of thrift, and of their misspent 
years. 

Lexington Avenue lay guileless beneath their 
rambling footfalls. At the corner of Twenty-second 
Street was a crowd gathered, and a man with the 
customary reverted cap in charge of a moving picture 
machine. A swift car drew up before the large 
house at the southeast corner. Thrill upon thrill: 
something being filmed for the movies! In the car, 
a handsome young rogue at the wheel, and who was 
this blithe creature in shiny leather coat and leather 
cap, with crumpling dark curls cascading beneath it? 
A suspicion tinkled in the breast of Spondee, in those 
days a valiant movie fan. Up got the young man, 
and hopped out of the car. Up stood the blithe 
creature — ^how neatly breeched, indeed, a heavenly 
forked radish — and those shining riding boots ! She 
dismounted — ^lifted down (so unnecessarily it 
seemed) by the rogue. She stood there a moment 
and Spondee was convinced, Dorothy Gish, said 
he to Dactyl. Miss Gish and her escort darted into 
the house, the camera man reeling busily. At an 
upper window of the dwelling a white-haired lady 

[191] 



Pipefuls 

was looking out, between lace curtains, with a sort of 
horror. Query, was she part of the picture, or only 
the aristocratic owner of the house, dismayed at 
finding her home suddenly become part of a celluloid 
drama? Spondee had always had a soft spot in his 
heart for Miss Dorothy, esteeming her a highly 
entertaining creature. He was disappointed in the 
tranquil outcome of the scene. He had hoped to 
see leaping from windows and all manner of 
liot stuff. Near by stood a coloured groom with 
a horse. The observers concluded that Miss Gish 
was to do a little galloping shortly. Dactyl and 
Spondee moved away. Spondee quoted a poem he 
had once written about Miss Dorothy. He recol- 
lected only two lines : 

She makes all the rest seem a shoal of poor fish 
So we cast our ballot for Dorothy Gish. 

Peering again into the dark backward and abysm, 
it seems that the two rejuvenated gossips trundled 
up on Lexington Avenue to Alfred Goldsmith's 
cheerful bookshop. Here they were startled to hear 
Mr. Goldsmith cry: "Well, Chris, here are some 
nice bones for you." One of these visitors assumed 
this friendly greeting was for him, but then it was 
explained that Mr. Goldsmith's dog, named Christ- 
mas, was feeling seedy, and was to be pampered. 
At this moment in came the postman with a package 
of books, arrived all the way from Canada. One of 
[192] 



Passage from Some Memoirs 

these books was "Salt of the Sea," a volume of tales 
by Morley Roberts, and upon this Spondee fell with 
a loud cry, for it contained "The Promotion of the 
Admiral," being to his mind a tale of great virtue 
which he had not seen in several years. Dactyl, 
meanwhile, was digging out some volumes of Gissing, 
and on the faces of both these creatures might have 
been seen a pleasant radiation of innocent cheer. Mr. 
Goldsmith also exhibited (it is still remembered) a 
beautiful photo of Walt Whitman, which entertained 
the visitors, for it showed old Walt with his coat- 
sleeve full of pins, which was ever Walt's way. 

How long ago it all seems. Does Miss Dorothy 
still act for the pictures? Does Chris, the amiable 
Scots terrier, still enjoy his bones? Does old 
Dactyl still totter about his daily tasks? Queer to 
think that it happened only yesterday. Well, time 
runs swift in New York. 



[193] 



FIRST LESSONS IN CLO^nSFING 




A MEDLEY of crashing music, pungently odd 
and exhilarating smells, the roaring croon of 
the steam calliope, the sweet lingering savour of 
clown-white grease paint, elephants, sleek barking 
seals, trained pigs, superb white horses, frolicking 
dogs, exquisite ladies in tights and spangles, the 
pallid Venuses of the "living statuary," a whole 
[ 194 ] 



First Lessons in Clowning 

jumble of incongruous and fantastic glimpses, mov- 
ing in perfect order through its arranged cycles — this 
is the blurred and ecstatic recollection of an amateur 
clown at the circus. 

It was pay day that afternoon and all the per- 
formers were in cheerful humour. Perhaps that was 
why the two outsiders, who played a very incon- 
spicuous part in the vast show, were so gently 
treated. Certainly they had approached the Garden 
in some secret trepidation. They had had visions 
of dire jests and grievous humiliations: of finding 
themselves suddenly astride the bare backs of 
berserk mules, or hoisted by blazing petards, or 
douched with mysterious cascades of icy water. 
Pat Valdo had written: "I am glad to hear you are 
going to clown a bit. I hope you both will enjoy the 
experience." To our overwrought imaginations 
this sounded a little ominous. What would Pat and 
his lively confreres do to us? 

We need not have feared. Not in the most genial 
club could we have been more kindly treated than in 
the dressing room where we found Pat Valdo openiag 
his trunk and getting out the antic costumes he had 
provided. (The eye of a certain elephant, to tell the 
truth, was the only real embarrassment we suffered. 
We happened to stand by him as he was waitiag to 
go on, and in his shrewd and critical orb we saw a 
complete disdain. He spotted us at once. He 
knew us for interlopers. He knew that we were not 

[195] 



Pipefuls 

a real clown, and his eye showed a spark of scorn. 
We felt shamed, and slunk away.) 

A liberal coating of clown-white, well rubbed into 
the palms before applying; a rich powdering of 
talcum; and decorations applied by Pat Valdo with 
his red and black paint-sticks — ^these give an effect 
that startles the amateur when he considers himself 
in the mirror. Topped with a skull-cap of white 
flannel (on which perches a supreme oddity in the 
way of a Hooligan hat) and enveloped in a baggy 
Pierrot garment — one is ready to look about and 
study the dressing room, where our fellows, in every 
kind of gorgeous grotesquerie, are preparing for the 
Grand Introductory Pageant — ^followed by the 
"Strange People." (They don't caU them Freaks 
any more.) Here is Johannes Joseffson, the Ice- 
landic Gladiator, sitting on his trunk, with his bare 
feet gingerly placed on his slippers to keep them off 
the dusty floor while he puts on his wrestling tights. 
As he bends over with arched back, and raises one 
leg to insert it into the long pink stocking, one must 
admire the perfect muscular grace of his thighs and 
shoulders. Here is the equally muscular dwarf, 
being massaged by a friend before he dons his pink 
frills and dashing plumed hat and becomes Mile. 
Spangletti, "the marvel equestrienne, darling of the 
Parisian boulevards." Here is the inevitable 
Charley Chaplin, and here the dean of all the clowns, 
an old gentleman of seventy-four, in his frolicsome 

[196] 



First Lessons in Clowning 

costume, as lively as ever. Here is a trunk in- 
scribed Australian Woodchoppers, and sitting on it 
one of the woodchoppers himself, a quiet, humor- 
ous, cultivated gentleman with a great fund of 
philosophy. A rumour goes the rounds — as it does 
behind the scenes in every kind of show. "Do you 
know who we have with us to-day.'' I see one of 
the boxes is all decorated up." "It's Mrs. Vincent 
Astor." "Who's she.'^" interjects the Australian 
woodchopper, satirically. "It's General Wood." 
"Did you hear, Wood and Pershing are here to-day.'' " 
Charley Chaplin asserts that he has "a good gag" 
that he's going to try out to-day and see how it goes. 
One of the other clowns in the course of dressing 
comes up to Pat Valdo, and Pat introduces his two 
pupils. "Newspaper men, hey?" says the latter. 
"What did you tell me for.? I usually double-cross 
the newspaper men when they come up to do some 
clowning," he explains to us. We are left wondering 
in what this double-crossing consists. Suddenly they 
all troop oflF down the dark narrow stairs for the 
triumphal entry. The splendour of this parade 
may not be marred by any clown costumes, so the 
two novices are left upstairs, peering through holes 
in the dressing-room wall. The big arena is all an 
expanse of eager faces. The band strikes up a 
stirring ditty. A wave of excitement sweeps 
through the dingy quarters of the Garden. The 
show is on, and how delirious it all is! 

[1971 



Pipefuls 

Downstairs, tlie space behind the arena is a fasci- 
nating jostle of odd sights. The elephants come 
swaying up the runway from the basement and stand 
in line waiting their turn. Here is a cage of trained 
bears. In the background stands the dogcatcher's 
cart, attached to the famous kicking mule. From 
the ladies' dressing quarters come the aerial human 
butterflies in their wings and gauzy draperies. On 
the wall is a list of names, Mail Uncalled For. One 
of the names is "Toby Hamilton." That must 
mean old Tody, and we fear the letter will never be 
called for now, for Tody Hamilton, the famous old 
Bamum and Bailey press agent, who cleaned up 
more "free space" than any man who ever lived, 
died in 1916. Suddenly appears a person clad 
in flesh tights and a barrel, carrying a label announc- 
ing himself as The Common People. Someone 
thrusts a large sign into the hands of one of the 
amateur clowns, and he is thrust upon the arena, to 
precede the barrelled Common People round the 
sawdust circuit. He has hardly time to see what 
the sign says — something about "On Strike Against 
$100 Suits." The amateur clown is somewhat 
aghast at the huge display of friendly faces. Is he to 
try to be funny.'* Here is the flag-hung box, and he 
tries to see who is in it. He doesn't see either Wood, 
Pershing, or Mrs. Astor, who are not there; but a lot 
of wounded soldiers, who smile at him encouragingly. 
He feels better and proceeds, finding himself, with a 
[198] 



First Lessons in Clowning 

start, just beneath some flying acrobats who are 
soaring in air, hanging by their teeth. Common 
People shouts to him to keep the sign facing toward 
the audience. The tour is made without palpable 
dishonour. 

Things are now moving so fast it is hard to keep 
up with them. Pat Valdo is dressed as a prudish 
old lady with an enormous bustle. Escorted by the 
clown policeman and the two amateurs, Pat sets out, 
fanning himself demurely. Hullo! the bustle has 
detached itself from the old lady, but she proceeds, 
unconscious. The audience shouts with glee. 
Finally the cop sees what has happened and screams. 
The amatem" clowns scream, too, and one of them, in a 
burst of inspiration, takes off his absurd hat to the 
bustle, which is now left yards behind. But Pat is 
imdismayed, turns and beckons with his hand. 
The bustle immediately runs forward of its own 
accord and reattaches itself to the rear of the skirt. 
You see, there is a dwarf inside it. The two amateur 
clowns are getting excited by this time and execute 
some impromptu tumbling. One tackles the other 
and they roU over and over desperately. In the 
scuffle one loses both his hat and skull-cap and 
flees shamefast from the scene. It is asserted by our 
partner that "this went big." He swears it got a 
laugh. Pat Valdo hurries off to prepare for his 
boomerang throwing. Pat is a busy man, for he is 
not only a clown, but he and Mrs. Valdo also do 

[199] 



Pipefuls 

wonderful stunts of their own on Ring Number 
One. 

And there are moments of sheer poetry, too. Into 
the darkened arena, crossed by dazzling shafts of 
light, speeds a big white motor car. Bird Millmail 
descends, tossing aside her cloak. "A fairy on a 
cobweb " the press agents call her, and as two hmnble 
clowns watch entranced through the peepholes in 
the big doors the phrase seems none too extravagant. 
See her, in a foam of short fluffy green skirts, twirl 
and tiptoe on the glittering wire, all grace and slen- 
derness and agile enchantment. She bows in the 
dazzle of light and kisses her hands to the crowd. 
Then she hops into the big car and is borne back 
behind the scenes. Once behind the doors her gay 
vivacity ceases. She sits, wearily, several minutes, 
before getting out of the car. And then, later, 
comes MUe. Leitzel. She, like all the other stars, is 
said to have "amazed all Em-ope." We don't 
know whether Europe is harder to amaze than 
America. Certainly no one could be more admir- 
ingly astounded than the amateur clowns gazing 
entranced through the crack of the doorway. To 
that nerve-tightening roll of drums she spins deliri- 
ously high up in giddy air, floating, a tiny human pin- 
wheel, in a shining cone of light. One can hear the 
crowd catch its breath. She walks back, all smiles, 
while her maid trots ahead saying something un- 
intelligible. Her tall husband is waiting for her at 
[200] 



First Lessons in Clowning 

the doorway. He catches her up like a child and 
carries her off, limp and exhausted. One of the 
clowns (irreverent creature) makes a piteous squawk 
and begs us to carry him to his dressing room. 
. A trained pig, trotting cheerfully round in search of 
tidbits, is retrieved from under the hooves of Mrs. 
Curtis's horse, which is about to go out and dance. 
The dogcatcher's wagon is drawn up ready to rush 
forth, and the trained terrier which accompanies it is 
leaping with excitement. He regards it as a huge 
lark, and knows his cue perfectly. When the right 
time comes he makes a dash for a clown dressed as an 
elderly lady and tears off her skirt. One of the 
amatemrs was allowed to ride behind the kicking 
mule, but to his great chagrin the mule did not kick 
as well as usual. Here are Charley Chaplin and some 
others throwing enormous dice from a barrel. No 
matter how the dice are thrown they always turn up 
seven. Into this animated gamble the amateur 
clown enters with enjoyment. All roimd him the 
wildest capers are proceeding. The double-ended 
flivver is prancing about. John Barleycorn's ftmeral 
procession is going its way. "Give me plenty of 
space," says Charley Chaplin to us, "so the people 
can watch me." We do so, reverently, for Charley's 
antics are worth watching. We make a wild dash, 
and plan to do a tumble in imitation of Charley's. 
To our disappointment we find that instead of sliding 
our feet dig into the soft sawdust, and the projected 

[201] 



Pipefuls 

collapse does not arrive. Intoxicated by the rich 
spice of circus odours, the booming calliope, the 
galloping horses, we hardly know what we are doing 
half the time. We hear Miss May Wirth, the 
Wonder Rider of the World, complaining bitterly 
that someone got in front of her when she was doing 
her particularly special stunt. We wonder dubi- 
ously whether we were the guilty one. Alas, it is all 
over but the washing up. Pat Valdo, gentlest of 
hosts, is taking off his trick hat with the water cistern 
concealed in it. He has a clean towel ready for his 
grateful pupils. 

The band is playing" The Star-Spangled Banner," 
and all the clowns, in various stages of undress, 
stand at attention. Our little peep into the gay, 
good-hearted, courageous, and extraordinary world 
of the circus is over. Pat and his fellows will go on, 
twice a day, for the next six months. It takes 
patience and endurance. But it must be some con- 
solation to know that nothing else in the world gives 
half as much pleasure to so many people. 



[202] 



HOUSE-HUNTING 




A CURIOUS vertigo afflicts the mind of the 
house-hunter. In the first place, it is suffi- 
ciently maddening to see the settled homes of other 
happier souls, all apparently so firmly rooted in a 
warm soil of contentment whUe he floats, an vm- 
happy sea-urchin, in an ocean of indecision. Further- 
more, how confusing (to one who likes to feel him- 
self somewhat securely established in a familiar 
spot) the startling panorama of possible places in 
which he visualizes himself. One day it is Great 
Neck, the next it is Nutley; one day HoUis, the next 

[203] 



PIpefuls 

Englewood; one day Bronxville, and then Garden 
City, As the telephone rings, or the suasive accents 
of friendly realtors expound the joys and glories of 
various regions, his uneasy imagination flits hop- 
pingly about the compass, conceiving his now 
vanished household goods reassembled and implanted 
in these contrasting scenes. 

Startling scenarios are filmed in his reeling mind 
while he listens, over the tinkling wire, to the 
enumeration of rooms, baths, pantries, mortgages, 
commuting schedules, commodious closets, open 
fireplaces, and what not. In the flash and corusca- 
tion of thought he has transported his helpless 
family to Yonkers, or to Manhasset, or to Forest 
HiUs, or wherever it may be, and tries to focus and 
clarify his vision of what it would all be like. He 
sees himself (in a momentary close-up) commuting on 
the bland and persevering Erie, or hastening hotly 
for a Liberty Street ferry, or changing at Jamaica 
(that mystic ritual of the Long Island brotherhood). 
For an instant he is settled again, with a modest 
hearth to return to at dusk . . . and then the sor- 
rowful compliment is paid him and he wonders how 
the impression got abroad that he is a millionaire. 

There is one consoling aspect of his perplexity, 
however, and that is the friendly intercoiu-se he has 
with high-spirited envoys who represent real estate 
firms and take him voyaging to see "properties" in 
the country. For these amiable souls he expresses 
[ 204 ] 



House-Hunting 

his candid admiration. Just as when one contem- 
plates the existence of the doctors one knows, one 
can never imagine them ill, so one cannot conceive 
of the friendly realtor as in any wise distressed or 
grieved by the problems of the home. There is 
something Olympian about them, happy creatures! 
They deal only in severely "restricted" tracts. 
They have a stalwart and serene optimism. Odd 
as it seems, one of these friends told us that some 
people are so malign as to waste the time of real 
estate men by going out to look at houses in the 
country without the slightest intention of "acting." 
As a kind of amusement, indeed ! A harmless way of 
passing an afternoon, of getting perhaps a free motor 
ride and enjoying the novelty of seeing what other 
people's houses look like inside. But our friend was 
convinced of one humble inquirer's passionate sin- 
cerity when he saw him gayly tread the ice floes of 
rustic Long Island in these days of slush and slither. 
How do these friends of ours, who see humanity in 
its most painful and distressing gesture (i. e., when 
it is making up its mind to part with some money), 
manage to retain their fine serenity and blitheness of 
spirit.? They have to contemplate all the pathetic 
struggles of mortality, for what is more pathetic 
than the spectacle of a man trying to convince a real 
estate agent that he is not really a wealthy creature 
masking millions behind an eccentric pose of hu- 
mility? Our genial adviser Grenville Kleiser, who 

[ 205 ] 



Pipefuls 

has been showering his works upon us, has classified 
all possible mental defects as follows: 

(a) Too easy acquiescence 

(6) A mental attitude of contradiction 

(c) Undue skepticism 

(d) A dogviatic spirit 

(e) LacJc of firmness of mind 

(J) A tendency to take extreme views 
(g) Love of novelty; that is, of what is foreign, 
ancient, unusual, or mysterious. 

All these serious weaknesses of judgment may be 
discerned, in rapid rotation, in the mind of the 
house-hunter. It would be only natural, we think, 
if the real estate man were to tell him to go away and 
study Mr. Kleiser's "How to Build Mental Power." 
In the meantime, the vision of the home he had 
dreamed of becomes fainter and fainter in the 
seeker's mind — ^like the air of a popular song he has 
heard whistled about the streets, but does not know 
well enough to reproduce. How he envies the light- 
hearted robins, whose house-hunting consists merely 
in a gay flitting from twig to twig. Yet, even in his 
disturbance and nostalgia of spirit, he comforts 
himself with the common consolation of his cronies 
— "Oh, well, one always finds something" — and thus 
(in the words of good Sir Thomas Browne) teaches 
his haggard and unreclaimed reason to stoop imto 
the lure of Faith. 
[206] 



LONG ISLx\ND REVISITED 

THE anfractuosities of legal procedure having 
caused us to wonder whether there really were 
any such place as the home we have just bought, we 
thought we would go out to Salamis, L. I., and have 
a look at it. Of course we knew it had been there a 
few weeks ago, but the title companies do confuse 
one so. We had been sitting for several days in the 
office of the most delightful lawyer in the world (and 
if we did not fear that all the other harassed and 
beset creatures in these parts would instantly rush to 
lay their troubles in his shrewd and friendly bosom 
we would mention his name right here and do a little 
metrical pirouette in his honour) — we had been 
sitting there, we say, watching the proceedings, 
without the slightest comprehension of what was 
happening. It is really quite surprising, let us add, 
to find how many people are suddenly interested in 
some quiet, innocent-looking shebang nestling off in 
a quiet dingle in the country, and how, when it is to 
be sold, they all bob up from their coverts in Flush- 
ing, Brooklyn, or Long Island City, and have to be 
"satisfied." What floods of papers go crackling 
across the table, drawn out from those mysterious 

[ 207 ] 



Pipefuls 

brown cardboard wallets; what quaint little jests 
pass between the emissaries of the title company 
and the legal counsel of the seller, jests that seem 
to bear upon the infirmity of human affairs and 
cause the well-wishing adventurer to wonder whether 
he had ever suflSciently pondered the strange tissue 
of mortal uncertainties that hides behind every 
earthly ventvu-e . . . there was, for instance, 
occasional reference to a vanished gentleman who 
had once crossed the apparently innocent proscenium 
of our estate and had skipped, leaving someone six 
thousand dollars to the bad; this ingenious buccaneer 
was, apparently, the only one who did not have to be 
"satisfied." At any rate, we thought that we, who 
entered so modestly and obscurely into this whole 
affair, being only the purchaser, would finally satisfy 
ourself, too, by seeing if the property was still there. 
Long Island and spring — the conjimction gives us 
a particular thrUl. There are more beautiful places 
than the Long Island flats, but it was there that we 
earned our first pay envelope, and it was there that 
we first set up housekeeping; and as long as we live 
the station platform of Jamaica will move us 
strangely — ^not merely from one train to another, but 
also inwardly. There is no soil that receives a more 
brimming benison of sunshine than Long Island in 
late April. As the train moves across the plain it 
seems to swim in a golden tide of light. Billboards 
have been freshly painted and announce the glories 
[208] 



Long Island Revisited 

of phonographs in screaming scarlets and purples, 
or the number of miles that divide you from a 
Brooklyn department store. Out at Hillside the 
stones that demarcate the territory of an old-fash- 
ioned house are new and snowily whitewashed. At 
Hollis the trees are a cloud of violent mustard-yellow 
(the colour of a safety-matchbox label). Magnolias 
(if that is what they are) are creamy pink. Moving 
vans are bustling along the road. Across the wide 
fields of Bellaire there is a view of the brown woods 
on the ridge, turning a faint olive as the leaves gaia 
strength. Gus Wuest's roadhouse at Queens looks 
iaviting as of old, and the red-brown of the copper 
beeches reminds one of the tall amber beakers. 
Here is the little park by the station in Queens, the 
flag on the staff, the forsythia bushes the colovu* of 
scrambled eggs. 

Is it the influence of the Belmont Park race track? 
There seem to be, in the smoking cars, a number of 
men having the air of those accustomed to associate 
(in a not unprofitable way) with horses. Here is 
one, a handsome person, who holds our eye as a 
bright flower might. He wears a flowing overcoat of 
fleecy fawn colotu' and a derby of biscuit brown. He 
has a gray suit and joyful socks of heavy wool, 
yellow and black and green in patterned squares 
which are so vivid they seem cubes rather than 
squares. He has a close-cut dark moustache, his 
shaven cheeks are a magnificent sirloin tint, his chin 

[209] 



Pipefuls 

splendidly blue by the ministration of the razor. 
His shirt is blue with a stripe of sunrise pink, and the 
collar to match. He talks briskly and humorously 
to two others, leaning over in the seat behind them. 
As he argues, we see his brown low shoe tapping on 
the floor. One can almost see his foot think. It 
pivots gently on the heel, the toe wagging in air, as 
he approaches the climax of each sentence. Every 
time he drives home a point in his talk down comes 
the whole foot, softly, but firmly. He relights his 
cigar in the professional manner, not by inhaling as he 
applies the match, but by holding the burned portion 
in the flame, away from his mouth, untU it has 
caught. His gold watch has a hunting case; when he 
has examined it, it shuts again with a fine rich snap, 
which we can hear even above the noise of the car. 
On this early morning train there are others 
voyaging for amusement. Here are two golfing 
zealots, puffing pipes and discussing with amazing 
persistence the minutiae of their sport. Their 
remarks are addressed to a very fashionable-looking 
curate, whose manners are superb. Whether he is 
going to play golf we know not; at any rate, he 
smiles mildly and politely to all they say. Per- 
haps he is going round the course with them, in the 
hope of springing some ecclesiastical strategy while 
they are softened and chastened by the glee of 
the game. The name of their Maker, it is only 
fair to suspect, has more than once been mentioned 
[ 210 ] 



Long Island Revisited 

on the putting green; and if it should slip out, the 
curate will seize the cue and develop it. In the 
meantime, one of the enthusiasts (while his com- 
panion is silenced in the act of lighting his pipe) is 
explaining to the cloth how his friend plays golf. 
"I'll tell you how he plays," he says. "Imagine him 
sitting down in a low chair and swinging a club. 
Then take the chair away and he still keeps the 
same position. That's what he looks like when he 
drives." The curate smiles at this and prepares his 
face to smile with equal gentleness when the other 
retorts. 

After Floral Park the prospect becomes more 
plainly rural. The Mineola trolley zooms along, 
between wide fields of titled brown earth. There is 
an occasional cow; here and there a really old barn 
and farmhouse standing, incongruously, among the 
settlements of modern kindling-wood cottages; and 
a mysterious agricultural engine at work with a 
spiiming fly-wheel. Against the bright horizon 
stand the profiles of Garden City: the thin cathe- 
dral spire, the bulk of St. Paul's school, the white 
cupola of the hotel. The tree-lined vistas of Mineola 
are placidly simmering in the morning sun. A 
white dog with erect and curly tail trots very pur- 
posefully round the corner of the First National 
Bank. We think that we see the spreading leaves of 
some rhubarb plants in a garden; and there are some 
of those (to us very enigmatic, as we are no gardener) 

[211] 



Pipefuls 

little glass window frames set in the soil, as though a 
whole house, shamed by the rent the owner wanted 
to charge, had sunk out of sight, leaving only a 
skylight. 

As we leave East Williston we approach more in- 
teresting country, with a semblance of hUls, and 
wooded thickets still brownly tapestried with the dry 
funeral of last year's leaves. On the trees the new 
foliage sways in little clusters, catching the light 
like the wings of perching green butterflies. Some of 
the buds are a coppery green, some a burning red, 
but the prevailing colour is the characteristic sulphur 
yellow of early spring. And now we are set down at 
Salamis, where the first and most surprising im- 
pression is of the unexpected abundance of com- 
petitive taxicabs. Having reached the terminus of 
our space, we can only add that we found our estate 
still there — and there are a few stalks of rhubarb 
surviving from an earlier plantation. 



[212] 



ON BEING IN A HURRY 

NEW YORK is a perplexing city to loaf in. 
(Walt Whitman if he came back to Mannahatta 
would soon get brain fever.) During the middle 
hours of the day, at any rate, it is almost impossible 
to idle with the proper spirit and completeness. 
There is a prevailing bustle and skirmish that 
"exerts a compulsion," as President Wilson would 
say. The air is electric and nervous. We have 
often tried to dawdle gently about the neighbour- 
hood of the City Hall in the lunch hour, to let the 
general form and spirit of that clearing among the 
cliffs sink into our mind, so that we could get some 
picture of it. We have sat under a big brown um- 
brella, to have our shoes shined, when we had noth- 
ing more important to do than go to the doughnut 
foundry on Park Row and try some of those delect- 
able combinations of foods they have there, such as 
sponge cake with whipped cream and chocolate 
fudge. And in a few seconds we have found ourself 
getting all stirred up and crying loudly to the artist 
that we only wanted a once-over, as we had an 
important appointment. You have to put a very 
heavy brake on your spirit in downtown New York 

[213] 



Pipefuls 



or you find yourself dashing about in a prickle of 
excitement, gloriously happy just to be in a hurry, 
without particularly caring whither you are hasten- 
ing, or why. 

One of the odd things about being in a hurry is 
that it seems so fiercely important when you yourself 
are the hurrier and so comically ludicrous when it is 
someone else. We see our friend Artaxerxes scorch- 
ing up Church Street and we scream with laughter at 
him, because we know perfectly well that there is 
absolutely not one of his affairs important enough to 
cause him to buzz along like that. We look after 
him with a sort of mild and affectionate pity for a 
deluded creature who thinks that his concerns are of 
such glorious magnitude. And then, a few hours 
later, we find ourself on 
a subway car with only 
ten minutes to catch the 
train for Salamis at 
Atlantic Avenue. And 
what is our state of 
mind? We stand, grit- 
ting our teeth (we are 
too excited to sit, even if 
there were a seat) and 
holding our watch. The 
whole train, it seems to us, is occupied by invalids, 
tottering souls and lumbago cripples, who creep off at 
the stations as though five seconds made not the 
[214] 




On Being in a Hurry 

slightest diflFerence. We glare and fume and could 
gladly see them all maeed in sunder with battle- 
axes. Nothing, it seems to us, could soothe our 
bitter hunger for haste but to have a brilliant 
Lexington Avenue express draw up at the platform 
with not a soul in it. Out would step a polite guard, 
looking at his watch. "You want to catch a train 
at 5:27?" he asks. "Yes, sir, yes, sir; step aboard." 
All the other competitors are beaten back with 
knotted thongs and we are ushered to a seat. The 
bells go chiming in quick sequence up the length of 
the train and we are off at top speed, flying wildly 
past massed platforms of indignant people. We 
draw up at Atlantic Avenue, and the solitary pas- 
senger, somewhat appeased, steps off. "Compli- 
ments of the Interborough, sir," says the guard. 

The commuter, urgently posting toward the 5 :27, 
misses the finest flavour of the city's life, for it is in 
the two or three hours after office work is over that 
the town is at her best. What a spry and smiling 
mood is shown along the pavements, particularly on 
these clear, warm evenings when the dropping sun 
pours a glowing tide of soft rosy light along the cross- 
town streets. There is a cool lightness in the air; 
restaurants are not yet crowded (it is, let us say, a 
little after six) and beside snowy tablecloths the 
waiters stand indulgently with folded arms. Every- 
body seems in a blithe and spirited humour. Work 
is over for the day, and now what shall we do for 

[215] 



Pipefuls 

amusement? This is the very peak of living, it 
seems to us, as we sally cheerily along the street. It 
is like the beginning of an O. Henry story. The 
streets are fluttering with beautiful women; light 
summer frocks are twinkling in the busy frolic air. 
Oh, to be turned loose at the corner of Broadway 
and Thirty-second Street at 6:15 o'clock of a June 
evening, with nothing to do but follow the smUe of 
adventure to the utmost! Thirty-second, we might 
add, is our favourite street in New York. It sad- 
dens us to think that the old boarding house on the 
corner of Madison Avenue is vanished now and all 
those quaint and humorous persons dispersed. We 
can still remember the creak of the long stairs 
and the clink of a broken slab in the tiled flooring of 
the hall as one walked down to the dining room. 

Affection for any particular street largely depends 
on the associations it has accumulated in one's 
mind. For several years most of our adventures in 
New York centred round Thirty-second Street; but 
its physique has changed so much lately that it has 
lost some of its appeal. We remember an old stone- 
yard that used to stand where the Pennsylvania 
Hotel is now, a queer jumbled collection of odd 
carvings and relics. At the front door there was a 
bust of Pan on a tall pedestal, which used to face us 
with a queer crooked grin twice a day, morning and 
evening. We had a great affection for that effigy, 
and even wrote a little piece about him in one of the 
[216] 



On Being in a Hurry 

papers, for which we got about $4 at a time when it 
was considerably needed. We used to say to our- 
self that some day when we had a home in the coun- 
try we would buy Pan and set him in a Long Island 
garden where he would feel more at home than in the 
dusty winds of Thirty-second Street. Time went on 
and we disappeared from our old haunts, and when 
we came back Pan had vanished, too. You may 
imagine our pleasure when we found him again the 
other day standing in front of a chop house on 
Forty-fourth Street. 

But one great addition to the delights of the 
Thirty-second Street region is the new and shining 
white tunnel that leads one from the Penn Station 
subway platform right into the heart of what used 
(we think) to be called Greeley Square. It is so 
dazzling and candid in its new tiling that it seems 
rather like a vast hospital corridor. One emerges 
through the Hudson Tube station and perhaps sets 
one's course for a little restaurant on Thirty-fifth 
Street which always holds first place in our affection. 
It is somewhat declined from its former estate, for 
the upper floors, where the violent orchestra was and 
the smiling little dandruffian used to sing solos when 
the evening grew glorious, are now rented to a feather 
and ostrich plume factory. But the old basement is 
still there, much the same in essentials, by which we 
mean the pickled beet appetizers, the minestrone 
soup, the delicious soft bread with its brittle crust, 

[217] 



Pipefuls 

and the thick slices of rather pale roast beef swim- 
ming in thin, pinkish gravy. And the three old 
French waiters, hardened in long experience of the 
frailties of mortality, smile to see a former friend. 
One, grinning upon us rather bashfully, recalls the 
time when there was a hilarious Oriental wedding 
celebrating in a private room upstairs and two young 
men insisted on going in to dance with the bride. 
He has forgiven various pranks, we can see, though 
he was wont to be outraged at the time. " Getting 
very stout," he says, beaming down at us. "You 
weigh a hundred pounds more than you used to." 
This is not merely cruel; it is untrue. We refrain 
from retorting on the growth of his bald spot. 



[218 



CONFESSIONS OF A HUMAN GLOBULE 

As A matter of fact, we find the evening sub- 
jLm. way jam very restful. Being neatly rounded 
in contour, with just a gentle bulge around the 
equatorial transit, we have devised a very satis- 
factory system. We make for the most crowded car 
we can find, and having buffeted our way in, we are 
perfectly serene. Once properly wedged, and pro- 
vided no one in the immediate neighbourhood is doing 
anything with any garlic (it is well to avoid the 
vestibules if one is squeamish in that particular) we 
lift our feet off the floor, tuck them into the tail 
of our overcoat, and remain blissfully suspended in 
midair from Chambers Street to Ninety-sixth. The 
pressure of our fellow-passengers, powerfully im- 
pinging upon the globular perimeter we spoke of, 
keeps us safely elevated above the floor. We have 
had some leather stirrups sewed into the bottom of 
our overcoat, in which we slip our feet to keep them 
from dangling uncomfortably. Another feature of 
our technique is that we always go into the car with 
our arms raised and crossed neatly on our chest, so 
that they will not be caught and pinioned to our 
flanks. In that position, once we are gently nested 

[219] 



Pipefuls 

among the elastic mass of genial humanity, it is 
easy to draw out from our waistcoat pocket our copy 
of Boethius's "Consolations of Philosophy" and 
really get in a little mental improvement. Or, if we 
have forgotten the book, we gently droop our head 
into our overcoat collar, lay it softly against the 
shoulder of the tall man who is always handy, and 
pass into a tranquil nescience. 

The subway is a great consolation to the philos- 
opher if he knows how to make the most of it. Think 
how many people one encoiuiters and never sees 
again. 



[220] 



NOTES ON A FIFTH AVENUE BUS 




FAB, down the valley of the Avenue the trafl&c 
hghts wink in unison, green, yellow, red, 
changing their colours with well-drilled promptness. 
It is cold: a great wind flaps and tangles the flags; 
the tops of the buses are almost empty. That brisk 
April air seems somehow in key with the mood of the 
Avenue — ^hard, plangent, glittering, intensely ma- 
terial. It is a proud, exultant, exhilarating street; it 
fills the mind with strange liveliness. A magnificent 
pomp of humanity — ^what a flux of lacquered motors, 
what a twinkling of spats along the pavements! 
On what other of the world's great highways would 
one find churches named for the material of which 
they are built.? — the Brick Church, the Marble 
Church ! It is not a street for loitering — there is an 
eager, ambitious humour in its blood; one walks fast, 
revolving schemes of worldly dominion. Only on 

[221] 



Pipefuls 

the terrace in front of the Public Library is there any 
temptation for tarrying and consideration. There 
one may pause and study the inscription — But Above 
All Things Truth Beareth Away the Victory . . . 
of course the true eloquence of the words lies in the 
But. Much reason for that But, implying a previous 
contradiction — on the Avenue's part? Sometimes, 
pacing vigorously in that river of lovely pride and 
fascination, one might have suspected that other 
things bore away the victory — spats, diamond neck- 
laces, smoky blue furs nestling under lovely chins. 
. . . Hullo! here is a sign, "Headquarters of the 
Save New York Committee." Hum! Save from 
what.? There was a time when the great charm of 
New York lay in the fact that it didn't want to be 
saved. Who is it that the lions in front of the Public 
Library remind us of.'' We have so often pondered. 
Let's see: the long slanting brow, the head thrown 
back, the haughty and yet genial abstraction — to be 
sure, it's Vachel Lindsay! 

We defy the most resolute philosopher to pass 
along the giddy, enticing, brilliant vanity of that 
superb promenade and not be just a little moved by 
worldly temptation. 



[222] 



SUNDAY MORNING 

IT WAS a soft, calm morning of sunshine and 
placid air. Clear and cool, it was "a Herbert 
Spencer of a day," as H. G. Wells once remarked. 
The vista of West Ninety-eighth Street, that en- 
gaging alcove in the city's enormous life, was all 
freshness and kempt tranquillity, from the gray roof 
of the old training ship at the river side up to the tall 
red spire near Columbus Avenue. This pinnacle, 
which ripens to a fine claret colour when suffused with 
sunset, we had presumed to be a church tower, but 
were surprised, on exploration, to find it a standpipe 
of some sort connected with the Croton water 
system. 

Sunday morning in this neighbourhood has its own 
distinct character. There is a certain air of lux- 
urious ease in the picture. One has a feeling that in 
those tall apartment houses there are a great many 
ladies taking breakfast in negligee. They are wear- 
ing (if one may trust the shop windows along Broad- 
way) boudoir caps and mules. Mules, like their 
namesakes in the animal world, are hybrid things, 
the offspring of a dancing pump and a bedroom 
slipper. They are distinctly futile, but no matter, 

[223] 



Pipefuls 

no matter. Wearing mules, however, is not a mere 
vanity; it is a form of physical cultiu-e, for these 
skimpish little things are always disappearing under 
the bed, and crawling after them keeps one slender. 
Again we say, no matter. This is no concern of ours. 
Near Broadway a prosperous and opulently tail- 
ored costume emerges from an apartment house: cut- 
away coat, striped trousers, very long pointed patent 
leather shoes with lilac cloth tops. Within this 
gear, we presently see, is a human being, in the 
highest spirits. "All set!" he says, joining a group 
of similars waiting by a shining limousine. Among 
these, one lady of magnificently millinered aspect, 
and a smallish man in very new and shiny riding 
boots, of which he is grandly conscious. There are 
introductions. "Mr. Goldstone, meet Mrs. Silver- 
ware." They are met. There is a 
flashing of eyes. Three or four silk 
hats simultaneously leap into the 
shining air, are flourished and re- 
placed. The observer is aware of 
the prodigious gayety and excite- 
ment of life. All climb into the 
car and roll away down Broadway. 
All save the little man in riding 
boots. He is left on the sidewalk, 
gallantly waving his hand. Come, 
we think, he is going riding. A satiny charger 
waits somewhere round the comer. We wDi follow 
[224] 




Sunday Morning 

and see. He slaps his hunting crop against his glo- 
rious boots, which are the hue of quebracho wood. 
No; to our chagrin, he descends into the subway. 

We sit on the shoeshiniag stand on Ninety-sixth 
Street, looking over the Sunday papers. Very odd, 
in the adjoining chairs men are busily engaged 
polishing shoes that have nobody in them, not 
visibly, at alny rate. Perhaps Sir Ohver is right 
after all. While we are not watching, the beaming 
Italian has inserted a new pair of laces for us. Long 
afterward, at bedtime, we find that he has threaded 
them in that unique way known only to shoe mer- 
chants and polishers, by which every time they are 
tied and untied one end of the lace gets longer and 
the other shorter. Life is full of needless com- 
plexities. We descend the hill. Already (it is 9 :45 
A. M.) men are playing tennis on the courts at the 
corner of West End Avenue. A great wagon 
crammed with scarlet sides of beef comes stimabling 
up the hill, drawn, with difficulty, by five horses. 

When we get down to the Ninety-Sixth Street pier 
we see the barque Windrtish lying near by with the 
airy triangles of her rigging pencilled against the 
sky, and look amorously on the gentle curve of her 
strakes (if that is what they are). We feel that it 
would be a fine thing to be off soundings, greeting 
the bounding bUlow, not to say the bar-room stew- 
ard; and yet, being a cautious soul of reservations all 
compact, we must admit that about the time we got 

[ 225 ] 



Pipefuls 

abreast of New Dorp we would be homesick for our 
favourite subway station. 

The pier, despite its deposit of filth, bales of old 
shoes, reeking barrels, scows of rubbish, sodden 
papers, boxes of broken bottles and a thick paste of 
dust and ash-powder everywhere, is a h^py loung- 
ing ground for a few idlers on Siuiday morning. A 
large cargo steamer, the Eclipse, lay at the wharf, 
standing very high out of the water. Three small 
boys were watching a peevish old man tending his 
fishing lines, fastened to wires with little bells on 
them. "What do you catch here?" we said. Just 
then one of the little bells gave a cracked tinkle 
and the angler pulled up a small fish, wriggling 
briskly, about three inches long. This seemed to 
anger him. He seemed to consider himself in some 
way humiliated by the incident. He grunted. One 
of the small boys was tactful. "Oh, gee!" he said. 
"Sometimes you catch fish that long," Ladicating a 
length which began at about a yard and diminished 
to about eighteen inches as he meditated. "I don't 
know what kind they are," he said. "They're not 
trouts, but some other kind of fish." 

This started the topic of relative sizes, always fas- 
cinating to small boys. "That's a pretty big boat," 
said one, craning up at the tall stem of the Eclipse. 
"Oh, gee, that ain't big!" said another. "You 
ought to see some of the Cunard boats, the Olympic 
or the Baltic." 
[2261 



Sunday Morning 

On Riverside Drive horseback riders were canter- 
ing down the bridlepath, returning from early out- 
ings. The squirrels, already grossly overfed, were 
brooding languidly that another day of excessive 
peanuts was at hand. Behind a rapidly spinning 
limousine pedalled a grotesquely humped bicyclist, 
using the car as a pacemaker. He throbbed fiercely 
just behind the spare tire, with his face bent down 
into a rich travelling cloud of gasoline exhaust. An 
odd Way of enjoying one's self ! Children were com- 
ing out in troops, with their nurses, for the morning 
air. Here was a little boy with a sailor hat, and on 
the band a gilt legend that was new to us. Instead 
of the usual naval slogan, it simply said Democracy. 
This interested us, as later in the day we saw an- 
other, near the goldfish pond in Central Park. Be- 
hind the cashier's grill of a Broadway drug store the 
good-tempered yoimg lady was reading Zane Grey. 
"I love his books," she said, "but they make me 
want to break loose and go out West." 



[227] 



VENISON PASTY 




THE good old days are gone, we have been 
frequently and authoritatively assured; and 
yet, sitting in an agreeable public on William Street 
where the bright eye of our friend Harold Phillips 
discerned venison pasty on the menu, and listening to 
a seafaring man describe a recent "blow" off 
Hatteras during which he stood four hours up to his 
waist in the bilges, and watching our five jocund 
companions dismiss no less than twenty-one beakers 
[228] 



Venison Pasty 

of cider, we felt no envy whatever for the ancients 
of the Mermaid Tavern. After venison pasty, 
and feeling somewhat in the mood of Robin Hood 
and Friar Tuck, we set off with our friend Endymion 
for a stroll through the wilderness. The first adven- 
ture of note that we encountered was the curb market 
on Broad Street, where we stood entranced at the 
merry antics of the brokers. This, however, is a spec- 
tacle that no layman can long contemplate and still 
deem himself sane. That sea of flickering fingers, the 
hubbub of hoarse cries, and the enigmatic gestures of 
youths framed in the open windows gave an impres- 
sion of something fierce and perilous happeurng. 
Endymion, still deeming himseK in Sherwood Forest, 
insisted that this was the abode of the Sheriff of 
Nottingham. "Stout deeds are toward!" he cried. 
"These villain wights have a damsel imprisoned in 
yonder keep!" With difficulty we restrained him 
from pressing to the rescue of the lady (for indeed we 
could see her, comely enough, appearing now and 
then at one of the windows; and anon disappearing, 
abashed at the wild throng). But gradually we 
realized that no such dire matter was being trans- 
acted, for the knights, despite occasional spasms of 
hot gesticulating fury, were mild and meant her no 
ill. One, after a sudden flux of business concerning 
(it seemed) 85 shares of Arizona Copper, fell sud- 
denly placid, and was eating chocolate ice cream from 
a small paper plate. Young gallants, wearing hats 

[ 229 ] 



Pipefuls 

trimmed with variegated brightly coloured stuffs 
(the favours of their ladies, we doubted not), were 
conferring together, but without passion or rancour. 

We have a compact with our friend Endymion that 
as soon as either of us spends money for anything not 
strictly necessary he must straightway return to the 
office. After leaving the curb market, we found our- 
selves in a basement bookshop on Broadway, and 
here Endymion fell afoul of a copy of Thomas 
Hardy's "Wessex Poems," illustrated by the author. 
Piteously he tried to persuade us that it was a matter 
of professional advancement to him to have this 
book; moreover, he said, he had just won five dollars 
at faro (or some such hazard) so that he was not 
really spending money at all; but we countered all 
his sophisms with slogging rhetoric. He bought the 
book, and so had to return to the office in disgrace. 

We fared further, having a mind to revisit the old 
Eastern Hotel, down by the South Ferry, of whose 
cool and dusky bar-room we had pleasant memories 
in times gone by; but we found to our distress that 
this also, like many more of our familiar landmarks, 
is a prey to the house-wrecker, and is on its way to 
become an office building. On our way back up 
Broadway it occurred to us to revisit what we have 
long considered one of the most impressive temples 
in our acquaintance, the lobby of the Telephone and 
Telegraph Building, on Dey Street. Here, passing 
by the enticing little terrace with brocaded chairs 
[230] 



Venison Pasty 

and soft lights where two gracious ladies sit to in- 
terview aspiring telephone debutantes, one stands in 
a dim golden glow, among great fluted pillars and 
bowls of softly burning radiance swung (like censers) 
by long chains. Occasionally there is an airy flutter, 
a bell clangs, bronze doors slide apart, and an 
elevator appears, in charge of a chastely uniformed 
priestess. Lights flash up over this dark little cave 
which stands invitingly open: UP, they say, LOCAL 
1-13. The door-sill of the cave shines with a row of 
golden beads (small lights, to guide the foot) — it is 
irresistible. There is an upward impulse about the 
whole place: the light blossoms upward from the 
hanging translucent shells: people step gently in, 
the doors close, they are not seen again. It is the 
temple of the great American religion, Going Up. 
The shining gold stars in the ceiling draw the eye 
aloft. The temptation is too great. We step into 
the little bronze crypt, say "Thirteen" at a venture, 
and are borne softly and fluently up. Then, of 
course, we have to come down again, past the 
wagons of spring onions on Fulton Street, and back 
to the oflice. 



[231] 



GRAND AVENUE, BROOKLYN 

WE HAVE always been a strong partisan of 
Brooklyn, and when we found ourself, in 
company with Titania, set down in the middle of 
a golden afternoon with the vista of Grand Avenue 
before us, we felt highly elated. Just how these two 
wayfarers chanced to be deposited in that quiet 
serenity, so far from their customary concerns, is 
not part of the narrative. 

There are regions of Brooklyn, we have always felt, 
that are too good to be real. Placid stretches of 
streets, with baby carriages simmering in the sun, 
solid and comfortable brownstone houses exhaling 
a prosperous condition of life, tranquil old-fashioned 
apothecaries' shops without soda fountains, where 
one peers in and sees only a solitary customer turn- 
ing over the pages of a telephone book. It is all 
rather like a chapter from a story, and reminds us of 
a passage in "The Dynamiter" where some im- 
troubled faubourgs of London are winningly de- 
scribed. 

Titania was wearing a little black hat with green 
feathers. She looked her best, and was not unaware 
of it. Our general plan, when destiny suddenly 
[ 232 ] 



Grand Avenue, Brooklyn 

plumps us into the heart of Brooklyn, is to make our 
way toward Fulton Street, which is a kind of life- 
line. Once on Fulton Street we know our way. 
Moreover, Fulton Street has admirable second- 
hand bookshops. Nor do we ever forget that it was 
at the corner of Fulton and Cranberry streets that 
"Leaves of Grass" was set up, in the spring of 1855, 
Walt doing a good deal of the work himself. The 
only difficulty about getting to Fulton Street is that 
people will give you such contradictory instruction. 
One will tell you to go this way; the next will point 
in the opposite direction. It is as though Brooklyn- 
ites suspect the presence of a stranger, and do not 
wish their sacred secrets to be discovered. There is 
a deep, mysterious freemasonry among the residents 
of this genial borough. 

At the corner of Grand and Greene avenues we 
thought it well to ask our way. A lady was stand- 
ing on the comer, lost in pleasant drowse. April 
sunshine shimmered all about: trees were bustling 
into leaf, a wagonload of bananas stood by the curb 
and the huckster sang a gay, persuasive madrigal. 
We approached the lady, and Titania spoke gently: 

"Can you tell me " The lady screamed, and 

leaped round in horror, her face stricken with fearful 
panic. She gasped and tottered. We felt guilty 
and cruel. "We were not meditating an attack," 
we said, "but just wanted to ask you the way to 
Fulton Street." Perhaps the poor soul's nerves 

[233] 



Pipefuls 

were unstrung, for she gave us instruction that 
we felt instinctively to be wrong. Had we gone as 
she said (we now see by studying the map) we would 
have debouched into WaUabout Bay. But un- 
doubtedly it was the protective instinct of the 
Brooklynite, on guard before strangers. Is there 
some terrific secret in Brooklyn that aU residents 
know about but which must never be revealed to 
outsiders.? 

Making a mental note not to speak too suddenly 
at the next encounter, the two cheerful derelicts 
drifted along the sunny coast of Grand Avenue. A 
shining and passionless peace presided over the 
streets. A gentle clop-clop of hooves came trotting 
down the way: here was a man driving a white horse 
in a neat rubber-tired buggy without a top. He 
leaned back and smiled to himself as he drove along. 
Life did not seem to be the same desperate venture 
it appears round about Broadway and Wall Street. 
Who can describe the settled amiability of those 
rows of considerable brown houses, with their heavy 
oak doors, their pots of daisies on the stoop, their 
clear window panes, and now and then the face of a 
benignant grandmother peeping from behind lace 
curtains. The secret of Brooklyn, perhaps, is con- 
tentment, and its cautious residents do not want the 
rest of us to know too much about it, lest we all 
fiock over there in swarms. 

We then came to the bustle of Fulton Street, 
[234] 



Grand Avenue, Brooklyn 

which deserves a book in itself. Some day we want 
to revisit a certain section of Fulton Street where (if 
we remember rightly) a rotisserie and a certain book- 
store conspire to make one of the pleasantest haunts 
in our experience. We don't know exactly what the 
secret of Brooklyn may be, but we are going to spend 
some time over there this spring and lie in wait for it. 



[235} 



ON WAITING FOR THE CURTAIN TO GO UP 




WE OFTEN wonder whether people are really 
as human as they appear, or is it only our 
imagination? Everybody, we suggest, thinks of 
others as being excessively human, with all the 
frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious 
[236] 



On Waiting for the Curtain 

condition. But each of us also (we are not dog- 
matic on this matter) seems to regard himself as 
<xisting on a detached plane of observation, exempt 
(save in moments of vivid crisis) from the strange 
whims of humanity en masse. 
V For example, consider the demeanour of people at 
a theatre while waiting for the curtain to go up. To 
note the censoriousness with which they study each 
other, one concludes that each deems himself (her- 
self) singularly blessed as the repository of human 
correctness. 

Incidentally, why is it that one gets so thirsty 
at the theatre.'' We never get thirsty at the movies, 
or not nearly so thirsty. The other evening we 
drank seven paper cups full of water in the inter- 
missions of a four-act play. 

The presence of people sitting behind one is the 
reason (we fancy) for a great deal of the queer 
antics that take place while one is waiting for the 
curtain to rise, particularly when it is twenty min- 
utes late in going up as it was at a certain theatre 
the other evening. People behind one have a hor- 
rible advantage. One knows that they can hear 
everything you say, unless you whisper it in a 
furtive manner, which makes them suspect things far 
worse than any one would be likely to say in a 
Philadelphia theatre, except, of course, on the stage. 
The fact that you know they can overhear you, and 
intend to do so, leads one on to make the most out- 

[237] 



Pipefuls 

rageous, cynical, and scoffish remarks, particularly 
to denounce with fury a play that you may be enjoy- 
joying quite passably well. All over the house you 
will hear (after the first act) men saying to their 
accompanying damsels, "How outrageously clumsy 
that act was. I can't conceive how the director 
let it get by." Now they only say this because 
they think it will make the people behind feel 
ashamed for having enjoyed such a botch. But does 
it.'^ The j>eople in the row behind immediately be- 
gin to praise the play vigorously, for the benefit of 
the people behind them; and in a minute you see the 
amusing spectacle of the theatre cheering and 
damning by alternate rows. 

Here and there you will see a lady whispering 
something to her escort, and will notice how ladies 
always look backward over a lily shoulder while 
whisj)ering. They want to see what effect this 
whispering will have on the people behind. There 
is a deep-rooted feud between every two rows in an 
audience. The front row, having nobody to hate 
(except possibly the actors), take it out in speculating 
why on earth anybody can want to sit in the boxes, 
where they can see nothing. 

What the boxes think about we are not sure. 
We never sat in a box except at a burlicue. 

And then a complete essay might be written on 
the ads in the theatre program — ^what high-spirited 
ads they are! How full of the savour and luxurious 
[238] • 



On Waiting for the Curtain 

tang of the beau monde! How they insist on saying 
spedcdite instead of specialty! 

Well, all we meant to say when we began was, the 
heroine was Only Fair — by which we mean to say 
she was beautiful and nothing else. 



[239} 



MUSINGS OF JOHN MISTLETOE 

IT WAS old John Mistletoe, we think, in his 
"Book of Deplorable Facts," discussing the 
congenial topic of "Going to Bed" (or was it in his 
essay on "The Concinnity of Washerwomen?") 
said something like this : 

Life passes by with deplorable rapidity. Post 
commutatorem sedet horologium terrificum, behind 
the commuter rideth the alarm clock, no sooner hath 
he attained to the office than it is time for lunch, no 
sooner hath lunch been dispatched than it is time to 
sign those dictated letters, no sooner this accom- 
plished, 'tis time to hasten trainward. The essential 
thing, then, is not to let one's experiences flow ir- 
revocably past like a river, but to clutch and hold 
them, thoughtfully, long enough to examine and, in 
a manner, sieve them, to halt them in the mind for 
meditation. The relentless fluidity of life, the ease 
with which it vanisheth down the channel of the 
days, is the problem the thoughtful man must deal 
with. The urgent necessity is to dam the stream 
here and there so we can go swimming in it. 

Time is a breedy creature : the minutes propagate 
hours, the hours beget days, the days raise huge 
families of months, and before we know it we are 
crowded out of this sweet life by mere surplus of 
Time's oflfspring. This is a brutish Malthusianism 

[240] 



Musings of John Mistletoe 

which must be adamantly coimtered. Therefore 
it is my comisel that every man, ere he retiie for the 
night and commit his intellect to inscrutable nothing- 
ness, do let it hop abroad for a little freedom. Life 
must be taken with a grain of saltation: let the spirit 
dance a measure or two ere it collapse. For this 
purpose it is my pleasure, about the hour of mid- 
night, to draw a jug of cider from the keg and a book 
from the shelf. I choose some volume ill written 
and stupidly conceived, to set me in conceit with 
myself. I read a few pages, and then apply myself 
to the composition of verses. These done, I bum 
them, and go to bed with a cheerful spirit. 



241] 



THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS ORATION 



Address to An Employer Upon Demanding a Raise, 
or. The Battle of Manila Envelopes 

As Planned As Delivered 



I think you will ad- 
mit, sir, that the quality 
of my work during the 
last two years has been 
such that my services 
could not easily be re- 
placed. I speak more 
in pain than in anger 
when I say that it has 
been a matter of pro- 
found surprise to me to 
note that you have not 
seen fit to acknowledge 
my value to the firm in 
some substantial way. I 
think I may say that 
I have been patient. 
I have continued my 
efforts with unremitting 
[242] 



If you are not too 
busy, sir, there is one 
other matter — in fact, 
the truth of the matter 
in fact is exactly — well, 
sir, I was precisely 
wondering whether — of 
course I know this is a 
bad time — indeed I have 
been very pleased to see 
business picking up a 
bit lately, and I am sure 
my own department has 
been — but to tell you the 
truth, sir, I have been 
wondering — of course it 
is just as you think best 
and I wouldn't think of 
insisting, but after all. 



Most Famous Oration 



zeal, and I think I may 
flatter myself that my 
endeavors have not been 
without result. I have 
here, carefully tabu- 
lated, a memorandum of 
the increased profits in 
my department during 
the last twelve months, 
due in great part to my 
careful management. I 
am sorry to have to 
force you into a decision, 
but I think I owe it to 
myself to say candidly 
that unless you see the 
matter in the same way 
that I do I shall feel 
obliged to deprive the 
firm of my services. 



perhaps I have made a 
mistake in mentioning 
it, but I was thinking 
that possibly you might 
bear in mind the idea of 
a possible future raise in 
salary at some future 
time. 



[243] 



ON LAZINESS 




TO-DAY we rather intended to write an essay 
on Laziness, but were too indolent to do so. 
The sort of thing we had in mind to write woidd 
have been exceedingly persuasive. We intended to 
discourse a little in favour of a greater appreciation 
of Indolence as a benign factor in human affairs. 

It is our observation that every time we get into 

trouble it is due to not having been lazy enough. 

Unhappily, we were born with a certain fund of 

energy. We have been hustling about for a number 

[244] 



On Laziness 

of years now, and it doesn't seem to get us anything 
but tribulation. Henceforward we are going to 
make a determined effort to be more languid and 
demure. It is the bustling man who always gets 
put on committees, who is asked to solve the prob- 
lems of other people and neglect his own. 

The man who is really, thoroughly, and philo- 
sophically slothful is the only thoroughly happy man. 
It is the happy man who benefits the world. The 
conclusion is inescapable. 

We remember a saying about the meek inheriting 
the earth. The truly meek man is the lazy man. 
He is too modest to believe that any ferment and 
hubbub of his can ameliorate the earth or assuage 
the perplexities of humanity. 

O. Henry said once that one should be careful to 
distinguish laziness from dignified repose. Alas, 
that was a mere quibble. Laziness is always dig- 
nified, it is always reposeful. Philosophical lazi- 
ness, we mean. The kind of laziness that is based 
upon a carefiJly reasoned analysis of experience. 
Acquired laziness. We have no respect for those 
who were bom lazy; it is like being born a million- 
aire: they cannot appreciate their bliss. It is the 
man who has hammered his laziness out of the stub- 
born material of life for whom we chant praise and 
allelulia. 

The laziest man we know — ^we do not like to 
mention his name, as the brutal world does not yet 

[245] 



Pipefuls 

recognize sloth at its community value — is one of the 
greatest poets in this country; one of the keenest 
satirists; one of the most rectilinear thinkers. He 
began life in the customary hustling way. He was 
always too busy to enjoy himself. He became 
surrounded by eager people who came to him to 
solve their problems. "It's a queer thing," he said 
sadly; "no one ever comes to me asking for help in 
solving my problems." Finally the light broke upon 
him. He stopped answering letters, buying lunches 
for casual friends and visitors from out of town, he 
stopped lending money to old college pals and fritter- 
ing his time away on all the useless minor matters 
that pester the good-natured. He sat down in a 
secluded cafe with his cheek against a seidel of dark 
beer and began to caress the universe with his in- 
tellect. 

The most damning argument against the Ger- 
mans is that they were not lazy enough. In the 
middle of Europe, a thoroughly disillusioned, in- 
dolent and delightful old continent, the Germans 
were a dangerous mass of energy and bumptious 
push. If the Germans had been as lazy, as indiffer- 
ent, and as righteously laissez-fairish as their neigh- 
bours the world would have been spared a great deal. 

People respect laziness. If you once get a repu- 
tation for complete, immovable, and reckless in- 
dolence the world will leave you to your own 
thoughts, which are generally rather interesting. 
[ 246 ] 



On Laziness 

Doctor Johnson, who was one of the world's 
great philosophers, was lazy. Only yesterday our 
friend the Caliph showed us an extraordinarily inter- 
esting thing. It was a little leather-bound notebook 
in which Boswell jotted down memoranda of his 
talks with the old doctor. These notes he after- 
ward worked up into the immortal Biography. And 
lo and behold, what was the very first entry in this 
treasxured little relic? 

Doctor Johnson told me in going to Ham from 
Ashbourne, 2£ September, 1777, that the way the 
plan of his Dictionary came to be addressed to Lord 
Chesterfield was this: He had neglected to write it 
by the time appointed. Dodsley suggested a desire 
to have it addressed to Lord C. Mr. J. laid hold 
of this as an excuse for delay, that it might be better 
done perhaps, and let Dodsley have his desire. Mr. 
Johnson said to his friend. Doctor Bathurst: "Now 
if any good comes of my addressing to Lord Chester- 
field it will be ascribed to deep policy and address, 
when, in fact, it was only a casual excuse for laziness. 

Thus we see that it was sheer laziness that led 
to the greatest triumph of Doctor Johnson's life, 
the noble and memorable letter to Chesterfield in 
1775. 

Mind your business is a good counsel; but mind 
your idleness also. It's a tragic thing to make a 
business of your mind. Save your mind to amuse 
yourself with. 

[247] 



Pipefuls 

The lazy man does not stand in the way of prog- 
ress. When he sees progress roaring down upon him 
he steps nimbly out of the way. The lazy man 
doesn't (in the vulgar phrase) pass the buck. He 
lets the buck pass him. We have always secretly 
envied our lazy friends. Now we are going to join 
them. We have burned our boats or our bridges or 
whatever it is that one burns on the eve of a mo- 
mentous decision. 

Writing on this congenial topic has roused us up 
to quite a pitch of enthusiasm and energy. 



[248; 



TEACHING THE PRINCE TO TAKE NOTES 




THE Prince of Wales probably suffers severely 
during his tours abroad, for he is a shy youth; 
but he also makes many friends, for he is a delight- 
fully simple and agreeable person. When we used 
to see him he looked a good deal like the tradi- 
tional priace of the fairy tales, for he was a slender 
boy with yellow hair, and blue eyes, and a quick pink 
blush. And we feel toward him the friendly sense 
of superiority that the college alumnus always feels 
toward the man who was a freshman when he him- 
self was a senior; for the prince and ourself stood in 
that relation a few years ago at a certain haxmt of 
letters. 

[249] 



Pipefuls 

There was a course of lectures on history that we 
were to attend. It was a popular course, and the at- 
tendance was large. Arriving late at the first 
lecture the room was packed, and we could see from 
the door that there was only one empty seat. This 
happened to be in the very front row, and wondering 
how it was that so desirable a place had not been 
seized we hastened to it. The lecturer was a swift 
talker, and we fell to taking notes busily. Not for 
some minutes did we have a chance to scrutinize 
our surroundings. We then saw that in the adjoin- 
ing chair sat the prince, and surmised that no one 
had wanted to take the chair for fear of being 
twitted by his companions for a supposed desire to 
hobnob with royalty. 

If we remember correctly, it was the prince's first 
term of college life. The task of taking notes from 
a rapid-fire lecturer was plainly one to which he was 
not accustomed, and as he wrestled with his note- 
book we could see that he had not learned the art of 
considering the lecturer's remarks and putting down 
only the gist of them, in some abbreviated system of 
his own, as every experienced student learns. Grant 
Robertson, the well-known historian, was lecturing 
on English constitutional documents, and his swift 
and informal utterance was perfectly easy to sum- 
marize if one knew how to get down the important 
points and neglect the rest. But the unhappy 
prince, desperately eager to do the right thing in 
[250] 



Teaching the Prince 

this new experience, was trying to write down every 
word. If, for instance, Mr. Robertson said (in a 
humorous aside), "Henry VHI was a sinful old man 
with a hobby of becoming a widower," the ex- 
perienced listener would jot down something like 
this: H 8, self-made widower. But we could see 
that the prince was laboriously copying out the 
sentence in full. And naturally, by the end of a few 
paragraphs, he was hopelessly behind. But he 
scribbled away industriously, doing his best. He 
realized, however, that he had not quite got the 
hang of the thing, and at the end of the lecture he 
turned to us with most agreeable bashfulness and 
asked if we would lend him our notebook, so that he 
could get down the points that he had missed. We 
did so, and briefly explained our own system of 
abbreviating. We noticed that in succeeding ses- 
sions our royal neighbour did very much better, 
learning in some measure to discriminate between 
what was advisable to note down and what was mere 
explanatory matter or persiflage on the part of the 
lecturer. But (if we must be candid) we would not 
recommend him as a newspaper reporter. And, in- 
deed, the line of work to which he has been called 
does not require quite as intense concentration as 
that of a cub on what Philip Gibbs caUs "The Street 
of Adventure." 

No one could come in contact with the prince 
without liking him, for his bashful, gentle, and 

[251] 



Pipefuls 

teachable nature is very winning. We remem- 
ber with a certain amusement the time that Grant 
Robertson got off one of his annual gags to the effect 
that, according to the principle of strict legitimacy, 
there were in Europe several hundred (we forget the 
figure) people with a greater right to the British 
throne than the family at present occupying it. The 
roomful of students roared with genial mirth, and 
the unhappy prince blushed in a way that young girls 
used to in the good old days of three-piece bathing 
suits. 



[252] 



I 



A CITY NOTEBOOK 

{Philadelphia) 

T WOULD be hard to find a more lovely spot 
in the flush of a summer sunset than Wister 
Woods. Old residents of the neighbourhood say 
that the trees are not what they were fifteen and 
twenty years ago; the chestnuts have died off; even 
some of the tall tulip-poplars are a little bald at the 
top, and one was recently felled by a gale. But still 
that quiet plateau stands in a serene hush, flooded 
with rich orange glow on a warm evening. The 
hollyhocks in the back gardens of Rubicam Street 
are scarlet and Swiss-cheese-coloured and black; and 
looking across the railroad raviae one sees crypts 
and aisles of green as though in the heart of some 
cathedral of the great woods. 

Belfield Avenue, which bends through the valley 
in a curve of warm thick yellow dust, will some day 
be boulevarded into a spick-and-span highway for 
motors. But now it lies little trafficked, and one 
might prefer to have it so, for in the stillness of the 
evening the birds are eloquent. The thrushes of 
Wister Woods, which have been immortalized by 
T. A. Daly in perhaps the loveliest poem ever 

[ 253 ] 



Pipefuls 

written in Philadelphia, flute and whistle their 
tantalizing note, while the song sparrow echoes them 
with his confident, challenging call. Down behind 
the dusty sumac shrubbery lies the little blue-green 
cottage said to have been used by Benjamin West 
as a studio. In a meadow beside the road two 
cows were grazing in the blue shadow of overhanging 
woodland. 

Over the road leans a flat outcrop of stone, known 
locally as "The Bum's Rock." An antique philoso- 
pher of those parts assured the wayfarer that it is 
named for a romantic vagabond who perished there 
by the explosion of a can of Bohemian goulash which 




he was heating over a small fixe of sticks; but one 
doubts the tale. Our own conjecture is that it is 
named for Jacob Boehm, the oldtime brewer of 
Germantown, who predicted in his chronicles that 
the world would come to an end in July, 1919. 
From his point of view he was not so far wrong. 
Above Boehm's Rock, in a grassy level among the 
[254 1 



A City Notebook 

trees, a merry little circle of young ladies was sit- 
ting round a picnic supper. The twilight grew 
darker and fireflies began to twinkle. In the steep 
curve of the Cinder and Bloodshot (between Fisher's 
and Wister stations) a cheerful train rumbled, with 
its engine running backward just like a country 
local. Its bright shaft of light wavered among the 
tall tree trunks. One would not imagine that it was 
less than six mUes to the City Hall. 
* * * 

A quarter to one a. m., and a hot, silent night » 
As one walks up Chestnut Street a distant roaring is 
heard, which rapidly grows louder. The sound has 
a note of terrifying menace. Then, careering down 
the almost deserted highway, comes a huge water- 
tank, throbbing like an airplane. A creamy sheet 
of water, shot out at high pressure, floods the street 
on each side, dashing up on the pavements. A knot 
of belated revellers in front of the Adelphia Hotel, 
standing in mid-street, to discuss ways and means 
of getting home, skip nimbly to one side, the ladies 
lifting up their dresses with shriU squeaks of alarm 
as the water splashes round them. Pedestrians 
plodding quietly up the street cower fearfully against 
the buildings, while a fine mist envelops them. 

After the tank comes, more leisurely, a squad of 
brooms. The street is dripping, every sewer opening 
clucks and gurgles with the falling water. There is 
something unbelievably humorous in the way that 

[255] 



Pipefuls 

roaring Niagara of water dashes madly down the 
silent street. There is a note of irony in it, too, for 
the depressed enthusiasts who have been sitting all 
evening in a restaurant over lemonade and ginger ale. 
Perhaps the chauffeur is a prohibitionist gone mad. 

* * * 

While eating half a dozen doughnuts in a Broad 
Street lunchroom at one o'clock in the morning, we 
mused happily about our friends all tucked away in 
bed, sound asleep. There is one in particular on 
whom we thought with serene pleasure. It was 
charming to think of that delightful, argumentative, 
contradictory, volatile person, his active mind stilled 
in the admirable reticence of slumber. He, so end- 
lessly speculatory, so full of imaginative enthusi- 
asms and riotous intuitions and troubled zeals con- 
cerning humanity, lost in a beneficent swoon of 
unconsciousness! We could not just say why, but 
we broke into chuckles to think of him lying there, 
not denying any of our statements, absolutely and 
positively saying nothing. To have one's friends 
asleep now and then is very refreshing. 

* * * 

Off Walnut Street, below Fifth, and just east of 
the window where that perfectly lovely damsel sits 
operating an adding machine — ^why is it, by the way, 
that the girls who run adding machines are always so 
marvellously fair.f* Is there some secret virtue in 
the process of adding that makes one lovely.'' We 
[2561 



A City Notebook 

feel sure that a subtracting engine would not have 
that subtle beautifying effect — ^just below Fifth 
Street, we started to say, there runs a little alley 
called (we believe) De Silver Court. It is a sombre 
little channel between high walls and barred win- 
dows, but it is a retreat we recommend highly to 
hay fever sufferers. For in one of the buildings 
adjoining there seems to be a warehouse of some 
company that makes an "aromatic disinfector." 
Wandering in there by chance, we stood delighted at 
thesweet medicinal savour thatwaswafted on the air. 
It had a most cheering effect upon our emunctory 
woes, and we lingered so long, in a meditative and 
healing ecstasy, that young women immured in the 
basement of the aromatic warehouse began to peer 
upward from the barred windows of their basement 
and squeak with astonished and nervous mirth. We 
blew a loud salute and moved away. 
* * * 
We entered a lunchroom on Broad Street for our 
favourite breakfast of coffee and a pair of crullers. 
It was strangely early and only a few of the flat-arm 
chairs were occupied. After dispatching the rations 
we carefully filled ovir pipe. With us we had a copy 
of an agreeable book, "The Calamities and Quarrels 
of Authors." It occurred to us that here, in the brisk 
serenity of the morning, would be a charming op- 
portunity for a five-minute smoke and five pages of 
reading before attacking the ardours and endurances 

[257] 



Pipefuls 




of the day. Lovingly we applied the match to the 
fuel. We began to read : 

Of all the sorrows in which the female character 
may participate, there are few more affecting than 
those of an authoress 

A stern, white-coated official came over to us and 
tapped us on the shoulder. 

"There's a sign behind you," he said. 
We looked, guiltily, and saw : 

POSITIVELY 
NO SMOKING 

* * * 
The cocoateria on Eighth Street closes at one A. M. 
Between twelve-thirty and closing time it is full of 
[258] 



A City Notebook 

busy eaters, mostly the night shift from the Chestnut 
Street newspaper offices and printing and engraving 
firms in the neighbourhood. Ham and eggs blossom 
merrUy. The white-coated waiters move in swift, 
stern circuit. Griddle cakes bake with amazing 
swiftness toward the stroke of one. Little dishes of 
baked beans stand hot and ready in the steam-chest. 
The waiter punches your check as he brings your 
frankfurters and coffee. He adds another perfora- 
tion when you get your ice cream. Then he comes 
back and punches it again. 

"Here," you cry,*'letit alone andstop buUyingit! " 
"Sorry, brother," he says. "I forgot that peach 
cream was fifteen cents." 

One o'clock. They lock the door and turn out 
the little gas jet where smokers light up. As the 
tables empty the chairs are stacked up on top. And 
if it is a clear warm evening the customers smoke 
a final weed along the Chestnut Street doorsteps, 
talking together in a cheery undertone 

No man has ever started upon a new cheque-book 
without a few sourly solemn thoughts. 

In the humble waters of finance wherein we paddle 
we find that a book of fifty cheques lasts us about 
four months, allowing for two or three duds when we 
start to make out a foil payable to bearer (self) and 
decide to renounce that worthy ambition and make it 
out to the gas company instead. 

[259] 



Pipefuls 

It occurs to us that if Bunyan had been writing 
"Pilgrim's Progress" nowadays instead of making 
Christian encounter lions in the path he would have 
substituted gas meters, particularly the quarter-in- 
the-slot kind that one finds in a seaside cottage. 
However 

Four months is quite a long time. It may be 
weak of us, but we can never resist wondering as we 
survey that flock of empty cheques just what ad- 
ventures our bank account is going to undergo during 
that period, and whether our customary technique 
of being aloof with the receiving teller and genial 
and commentary with the paying ditto is the right 
one. We always believe in keeping a paying teller 
in a cheerful frame of mind. We would never ad- 
mit to him that we think it is going to rain. We say, 
rather, "Well, it may blow over," and try not to 
surmise how many hundreds there are in the pile at 
his elbow. Probably we think the explanation for 
the really bizarre architecture of our bank is to keep 
depositors' attention from the money. Unquestion- 
ably Walt Whitman's tomb over in Harleigh — ^Walt's 
vault — ^was copied from our bank. 

The cheques in our book are blue. We have always 
regretted this. If we had known it beforehand 
perhaps we would have inflicted our problems upon 
another bank. Because there are so many more in- 
teresting colours for cheques, tints upon which the ink 
shows up in a more imposing manner. A pale pink 
[ 260 ] 



A City Notebook 

or cream-coloured cheque for $2.74 looks much more 
exciting than a blue cheque for $25. We have known 
gray, pink, white, brown, green, and salmon-coloured 
cheques. A friend of ours once showed us one that 
was a bright orange, but refused to let us handle it. 
But yellow is the colour that appeals to us most 
strongly. When we were very young and away from 
home our monthly allowance, the amount of which 
we shall not state, but it cost us less effort than any 
money we ever received since, came to us by way of 
pale primrose-coloured cheques. For, after all, there 
are no cheques like those one used to get from one's 
father. We hope the Urchin will think so some day. 

We like to pay homage to the true artist in all 
lines. At the corner of Market and Marshall 
streets — ^between Sixth and Seventh — the collar- 
clasp orator has his rostrum, and it seems to us that 
his method of harangue has the quality of genuine 
art. He does not bawl or try to terrify or bully his 
audience into purchase as do the auctioneers of the 
"pawnbrokers' outlets." How gently, how win- 
ningly, how sweetly he pleads the merits of his little 
collar clasp ! And there is shrewd imagination in his 
attention-catching device, which is a small boy 
dressed in black, wearing a white hood of cheese- 
cloth that hides his face. This peculiar silent figure, 
with a touch of mystery about it, serves to keep the 
crowd wondering imtU the oration begins. 

[ 261 ] 



Pipefuls 




With a smile, with infinite ingratiation and gentle 
persuasion, our friend exhibits the merits of his 
device which does away with the traditional collar- 
button. His art is to make the collar-button seem a 
piteous, almost a tragic 
thing. His eyes swim 
with unshed tears as hede- 
scribes the discomfort of 
the man whose collar, 
fastened by the customary 
button, cannot be given 
greater freedom on a hot, 
muggy day. He shows, by 
exhibition on his own per- 
son, the exquisite relief afiPorded by the adjustable col- 
lar clasp. "When the day grows cool," he says, "when 
you begin to enjoy yourself and want your collar 
tighter, you just loosen the clasp, slide the tabs closer 
together, and there you are. And no picking at 
your tie to get the knot undone. Now, how many 
of you men have spoiled an expensive tie by picking 
at it? Your fingers come in contact with the fibres 
of the silk and the first thing you know the Lie is 
soiled. This little clasp "^and he casts a beam of 
affection upon it — "saves your tie, it saves your 
collar, and it saves your patience." A note of 
yearning pathos comes into his agreeable voice, and 
he holds out a handful of the old-fashioned collar- 
buttons. "You men are wearing the same buttons 
[262] 



A City Notebook 

your great-grandfathers wore. Don't you want to 
get out of collar slavery? Don't you want to quit 
working your face all out of shape struggling with a 
collar-button? Now as this is a manufacturing 

demonstration ' ' 

* * * 

On a warm evening nothing is more pleasant than 
a ride on the front platform of the Market Street L, 
with the front door open. As the train leaves Sixty- 
ninth Street it dips down the Millbourne bend and 
the cool, damp smell of the Cobb's Creek meadows 
gushes through the car. Then the track straightens 
out for a long run toward the City Hall. Roaring 
over the tree tops, with the lights of movies and 
shops glowing up from below, a warm typhoon 
makes one lean against it to keep one's footing. 
The airy stations are lined by girls in light summer 
dresses, attended by their swains. The groan of the 
wheels underfoot causes a curious tickling in the 
soles of the feet as one stands on the steel plat- 
form. 

This groan rises to a shrill scream as the train gath- 
ers speed between stations, gradually diminishing 
to a reluctant grumble as the cars come to a stop. 
In the distance, in a peacock-blue sky, the double 
gleam of the City Hall tower shines against the 
night. Down on the left is the hiss and clang of 
West Philadelphia station, with the long, dim, amber 
glow of the platform and belated commuters pacing 

[263] 



Pipefuls 

about. Then the smoky dive across the Schuylkill 
and the bellow of the subway. 
* * * 

From time to time humanity is forced to revise its 
customary notions in the interests of truth. This is 
always painful. 

It is an old fetich that the week-end in summer is a 
time for riotous enjoyment, of goodly cheer and 
mirthful solace. A careful examination of human 
beings during this hebdomadal period of carnival 
leads us to question the doctrine. 

When we watch the horrors of discomfort and 
vexation endured by simple-hearted citizens in 




pursuit of a light-hearted Saturday and Sunday, we 
often wonder how it is that humanity will so glee- 
fully inflict upon itself sufferings which, if they were 
imposed by some taskmaster, would be called 
atrocious. 
[ 264 ] 



A City Notebook 

We observe, for instance, women and children 
standing sweltering in the aisles of trains during a 
two-hour run to the seashore. We observe the 
number of drownings, motor accidents, murders, and 
suicides that take place during the Saturday to 
Monday period. We observe families loaded down 
with small children, who might have been happy and 
reasonably cool at home, struggling desperately to 
get away for a day in the coimtry, rising at 5 a. m., 
standing in hne at the station, fanning themselves 
with blasphemy, and weary before they start. We 
observe them chased home by thunderstorms or 
colic, dazed and blistered with sunburn, or groaning 
with a surfeit of ice cream cones. 

It is a lamentable fact (and the truth is almost al- 
ways lamentable, and hotly denied) that for the 
hard-working majority the week-end is a curse 
rather than a blessing. The saddest fact in human 
annals is that most people are never so happy as 
when they are hard at work. The time may come 
when criminals will be condemned, not to the chair, 
but to twenty successive week-ends spent standing 
in the aisles of crowded excursion trains. 
* * * 

Strolling downtown to a well-known home of fish 
dinners, it is appetizing to pass along the curve of 
Dock Street in the coolness of the evening. The 
clean, lively odours of vegetables and fruit are strong 
on the air. Under the broad awnings of the com- 

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Pipefuls 




mission merchants and produce dealers the stock is 
piled up in neat and engaging piles ready to be 
carted away at dawn. Under the glow of pale arcs 
and gas lamps the colours of the scene are vivid. 
Great baskets of eggplant shine like huge grapes, a 
polished port wine colour; green and scarlet peppers 
catch points of light; a flat pinkish colour gleams on 
carrots. Each species seems to have an ordered 
pattern of its own. Potatoes are ranged in a pyra- 
mid; watermelons in long rows; white and yellow 
onions are heaped in sacks. The sweet musk of 
cantaloupes is the scent that overbreathes all others. 
Then, down nearer to the waterfront, comes the 
strong, damp fishy whiff of oysters. To stroll 
among these gleaming pUes of victuals, to watch the 
various colours where the lamps pour a pale silver and 
yellow on cairns and pyramids of vegetables, is to 
gather a lusty appetite and attack the first oyster 
stew of the season with a stout heart. 



[266 



A City Notebook 

It being a very humid day, we stopped to com- 
pliment the curly-headed sandwich man at Ninth 
and Market on his decollete corsage, which he 
wears in the Walt Whitman manner. "Wish we 
could get away with it the way you do," we said, 
admiringly. He looked at us with the patience of 
one inured to bourgeois comment. "It's got to be 
tried," said he, "like everything else." 

4: ^ * 

We stopped by the Weather Man's little il- 
luminated booth at Ninth and Chestnut about 
10 o'clock in the evening. We were scrutinizing his 
pretty coloured pictures, wondering how soon the 
rain would determine, when a slender young man 
appeared out of the gloom, said "I'm sorry to have 
to do this," switched off the light, and pulled down 
the rolling front of the booth. It was the Weather 
Man himself. 

We were greatly elated to meet this mythical sage 
and walked down the street a little way with him. 
In order to cheer him up, we complimented him on 
the artistic charm of his little booth, with its glow of 
golden light shining on the coloured map and the 
bright loops and ciu^ves of crayon. We told him 
how almost at any time in the evening groups of 
people can be seen admiring his stall, but his 
sensitive heart was gloomy. 

"Most of them don't understand it," he said, 
morosely. "The women are the worst. I've gone 

[267] 



Pipefuls 

there in tlie evening and found them studying the 
map eagerly. Hopefully, I would creep up behind 
to hear their comments. One will say, 'Yes, that's 
where my husband came from,' or 'I spent last sum- 
mer over there,' pointing to some place on the map. 
They seem to think it's put there for them to study 
geography." 

We tried to sympathize with the broken-hearted 
scientist, but his spirit had been crushed by a long 
series of woes. 

"The other evening," said he, "I saw a couple of 
girls gazing at the map, and they looked so intel- 
ligent I really was charmed. Apparently they were 
discussing an area of low pressure that was moving 
down from the Great Lakes, and I lent an ear. Im- 
agine my chagrin when one of them said: 'You see 
the colour of that chalk line? I'm going to make my 
next knitted vestee just like that.' And the other 
one said: 'I think the whole colour scheme is ador- 
able. I'm going to use it as a pattern for my new 
camouflage bathing-suit.' 

"Thank goodness," cried the miserable Weather 
Man! "I have another map like that down at the 
Bourse, and the brokers really give it some intelligent 
attention." 

We went on our way sadly, thinking how many 

sorrows there are in the world. It is grievous to 

think of the poor Weather Man, lurking with beating 

pulses in the neighbourhood of Ninth and Chestnut 

[268] 



A City Notebook 

in the hope of finding someone who understands his 
painstaking display. The next time you are stand- 
ing in front of his booth do say something about 
the Oceanic High in the South Atlantic or the 
dangerous Aleutian Low or the anticyclonic condi- 
tion prevailing in the Alleghanies. He might over- 
hear you, and it would do his mournful heart good. 




It was eight o'clock, a cool drizzling night. 
Chestnut Street was gray with a dxill, pearly, 
opaque twilight. In the little portico east of In- 
dependence Hall the gas lamp under the ceiling 
cast a soft pink glow on the brick colunms. 

Independence Square was a sea of tremulous, 
dripping boughs. The quaint heptahedral lamps 
threw splashed shimmers of topaz colour across the 
laky pavement. "Golden lamps in a green night," 
as Marvell says, twinkled through the stir and mois- 
ture of the evening. 

[269] 



ON GOING TO BED 

ONE of the characters in "The Moon and Six- 
pence" remarked that he had faithfully lived 
up to the old precept about doing every day two 
things you heartUy dislike; for, said he, every day 
he had got up and he had gone to bed. 

It is a sad thing that as soon as the hands of the 
clock have turned ten the shadow of going to bed 
begins to creep over the evening. We have never 
heard bedtime spoken of with any enthusiasm. 
One after another we have seen a gathering disperse, 
each person saying (with an air of solemn resigna- 
tion) : "Well, I guess I'll go to bed." But there was 
no hilarity about it. It is really rather touching 
how they cling to the departing skirts of the day that 
is vanishing under the spinning shadow of night. 

This is odd, we repeat, for sleep is highly popular 
among human beings. The reluctance to go to 
one's couch is not at all a reluctance to slumber, for 
almost all of us will doze happily in an armchair or on 
a sofa, or even festooned on the floor with a couple of 
cushions. But the actual and formal "yielding to 
sheets and blankets is to be postponed to the lasl 
possible moment. 
[270] 



On Going to Bed - 

The devil of drowsiness is at his most potent, we 
find, about 10:30 p. m. At this period the human 
carcass seems to consider that it has finished its 
cycle, which began with so much courage nearly 
sixteen hours before. It begins to slack and the 
mind halts on a dead centre every now and then, re- 
fusing to complete the revolution. Now there are 
those who hold that this is certainly the seemly and 
appointed time to go to bed and they do so as a 
matter of routiae. These are, commonly, the 
happier creatures, for they take the tide of sleep at 
the flood and are borne calmly and with gracious 
gentleness out to great waters of nothingness. They 
push off from the wharf on a tranquil current and 
nothing more is to be seen or heard of these voyagers 
until they reappear at the breakfast table, digging 
lustily into their grape fruit. 

These people are happy, aye, in a brutish and 
sedentary fashion, but they miss the admirable 
adventures of those more embittered wrestlers who 
wiU not give in without a struggle. These latter 
suffer severe pangs between 10:30 and about 11:15 
while they grapple with their fading faculties and 
seek to reestablish the will on its tottering throne. 
This requires courage stout, valour imbending. 
Once you yield, be it ever so little, to the tempter, 
you are lost. And here our poor barren clay plays us 
false, undermining the intellect with many a trick 
and wile. "I will sit down for a season in that com- 

[ 271 ] 



Pipefuls 

fortable chair," the creature says to himself, **and 
read this sprightly novel. That will ease my mind 
and put me in humour for a continuance of lively 
thinking." And the end of that man is a steady 
nasal buzz from the bottom of the chair where he 
has collapsed, an unsightly object and a disgrace to 
humanity. This also means a big bill from the 
electric light company at the end of the month. In 
many such ways will his corpus bewray him, leading 
him by plausible self-deceptions into a pitfall of 
sleep, whence he is aroused about 3 a. m. when the 
planet turns over on the other side. Only by stiflF 
perseverance and rigid avoidance of easy chairs may 
the critical hour between 10:30 and 11:30 be safely 
passed. Tobacco, a self -brewed pot of tea, and a 
browsing along bookshelves (remain standing and do 
not sit down with your book) are helps in this time of 
struggle. Even so, there are some happily drowsy 
souls who can never cross these shallows alone with- 
out groimding on the Lotus Reefs. Our friend 

J D K , magnificent creature, was 

(when we lived with him) so potently hypnophil that, 
even erect and determined as his bookcase and 
urgently bent upon Brann's Iconoclast or some other 
literary irritant, sleep would seep through his pores 
and he would fall with a crash, lying there in un- 
conscious bliss vmtil someone came in and prodded 
him up, reeling and ashamed. 

But, as we started to say, those who survive this 

[272] 



On Goinff to Bed 

drastic weeding out which Night imposes upon her 
wooers — so as to cull and choose only the truly meri- 
torious lovers — experience supreme delights which 
are unknown to their snoring fellows. When the 
struggle with somnolence has been fought out and 
won, when the world is all-covering darkness and 
close-pressing silence, when the tobacco suddenly 
takes on fresh vigour and fragrance and the books lie 
strewn about the table, then it seems as though all 
the rubbish and floating matter of the day's thoughts 
have poured away and only the bright, clear, and 
swift current of the mind itself remaias, flowing 
happily and without impediment. This perfection 
of existence is not to be reached very often; but 
when properly approached it may be won. It is a 
different mind that one uncovers then, a spirit which 
is lucid and hopeful, to which (for a few serene hours) 
time exists not. The friable resolutions of the day 
are brought out again and recemented and chiselled 
anew. Surprising schemes are started and carried 
through to happy conclusion, lifetimes of amaze- 
ment are lived in a few passing ticks. There is one 
who at such moments resolves, with complete 
sincerity, to start at one end of the top shelf and read 
again all the books in his library, intending this 
time really to extract their true marrow. He takes 
a clean sheet of paper and sets down memoranda of 
all the people he intends to write to, and all the 
plumbers and what not that he will call up the next 

[273] 



Pipefuls 

day. And the next time this happy seizure attacks 
him he will go through the same gestures again with- 
out surprise and without the slightest mortification. 
And then, having lived a generation of good works 
since midnight struck, he summons all his resolution 
and goes to bed. 




[274] 




THE COTJNTRT LIFE I BESS 
GABDEN CITY, N. Y. 



LEJ^^'^'g 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

015 909 596 4 



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